Spent a couple of days last week spring cleaning social media accounts, and it's kind of left me pining for the days when those platforms were actually useful for something other than performative outrage.
I properly quit The Social Media Platform Formally Known As Twitter, too; I deleted my archive, removed the header and even changed the profile pic, and, honestly, I do not miss it. I'd already scaled back before it was bought by The World's Cringiest Man, and, since it's very quickly become Nazi Central, I thought it was time to go completely.
Probably against my better judgement, I went back to tidy up and clean out my old Facebook account, and discovered it's still a broken, unusable mess of a thing. Any posts with links to other sites are buried by the algorithm, which makes the entire thing completely useless (I know you can click over to feeds to see everything, but my argument is, and always will be, you shouldn't have to, seeing everything from the people you follow should be the default). Instagram is, basically, the same, but with prettier pictures peppered in amongst the ads, and Threads... I believe the phrase I'm looking for is: "jfc." I spent all of ten minutes on it, then quit it. I would delete the account, but you can't without deleting your Instagram account. Although, that doesn't sound so bad, thinking about it.
My basic takeaway from all that is, that everything Meta has a hand in is just unusable (except WhatsApp, but I'm expecting that to change any time - algorithmic messaging, where you only see the messages the app wants you to!).
Mastodon, on the other hand, is...nice, I guess...? It's quiet and feels very pastoral, but it's also...slow, and difficult to find people there, and, frankly not all that great for news (especially UK news). And - depending on the instance you're on - is, potentially, at the whims of moderators/instance owners who may just arbritarily decide to start messing around with it or shut it down completely. Y'know, maybe it is like Twitter after all...
BlueSky, on the other hand, is just Twitter, but with less Nazis. For now, anyway. And...I think that's the problem with it (that it's like Twitter, not that it doesn't have Nazis, just to be clear). It's just New Twitter, and it's going to bring all the problems of Old Twitter when it finally opens its doors to the world. And maybe that's fine...? Maybe that's what people want...? Personally, I'm not sure if I do. Then, I think I'm done with Twitter in any flavour, really.
But, the overarching feeling I've got about all of those platforms is that they're no fun. Each of them are a slog to get into, to learn and actually make useful, and, honestly, I don't have the time, energy or even will to go through each one and learn their ins and outs, or the "etiquette" that each one develops and has enforced by random users (looking at you Mastodon).
I'll keep a presence on the platforms, of course, because they're a necessity, unfortunately, but I'm going to go away and have a re-think about how to use them, to see if I can figure out a different way to make them useful, and, hopefully, make them work for me.
