At the end of last week, I dipped a toe back into social media to post a promo image for the new Velicity Jones story (coming next week!), and, after the usual disappointment of not getting any response at all, I found myself casually browsing BlueSky, Mastodon and Instagram. I was kind of struck by how much it's all changed, or, maybe it was how much I've changed, I'm not sure. It felt like going back to an old house you used to visit; you can recall virtually every detail, right down the sounds and smells, but when you actually, physically return to it, you find that it only bares the vaguest resemblance to your memories.
Well, OK, that doesn't really track with Instagram, considering it's been pretty much useless since the last ice age. There's nothing more I can add about it that hasn't already been said hundreds of times before: it's gone from a photo sharing app to being something that just shows you mostly random pictures and videos from people you've never heard of and probably won't follow, in the vague hope you might stick around and increase the numbers that Meta can show investors to make their share prices to go up. It is, practically, useless for pretty much anything now. Although, I did discover that my account is now linked to my dormant FB account, and there doesn't appear to be any way to unlink them. Which is fun.
But the other two...
I won't lie: I had a fondness for BlueSky. For a time, it felt like the promise of what Twitter started out as: a way to just...connect with people. But it became clear everyone was treating it as New Twitter, a town square where everyone is yelling "look at me" and trying to establish themselves as brands. "You need to engage with people to get the best out of BlueSky," we were told by the Big Accounts who emerged there, and who refused to engage with anyone, because engaging was something only the lowly users of the site did with Big Accounts. The sheer force of gravity they brought to bare on the site forced BlueSky to become Twitter 2.0, a place where you simply broadcast, but don't receive, moulded to their whims, so they can be Discourse Leaders and shape the conversation however they choose.
Still, there were some good features - or interesting ones, at least - like the fact you could create your own, dedicated feeds, or follow ones others had put together - although, checking out a UK politics feed usually had loads of Americans in it, talking about American politics, which just hammered home the homogeneous nature of the site. It was always a very US centred place, with almost everything filtered through that lens, making it difficult to find anything or even follow a discussion without it being derailed by Americans determined to make it about them and their politics.
And let's not even get into the userbase's apparent inability to parse a joke.
Looking in there after being away for so long, I, naively, thought things might have changed, but if anything, it's all just become more entrenched and, to some extent, alien to me. I realised it's just a place I don't really want to return to (and with the news that the CEO is stepping down to be replaced by someone with a venture capitalist background gives me the feeling I jumped ship at the right time).
Mastodon, however, is something different - purely because of the fact you can actually find news stories and articles posted there that aren't American-centric. It's a nice reminder that a whole world exists beyond the borders of the US of A.
It seems to have developed a nicer, gentler vibe while I've been away, too, with people being less obnoxious than I remember - well, apart from a particular kind of Reply Guy who always - always - pops up in the replies to any post about tech and smugly points out "I don't use this thing." I mean, and? Does the world need to know that? Does it make you feel superior somehow? Does it just give you some kind of dopamine hit every time you type a variation on that?
For the most part, I kind of dig the more parochial, village vibe of Mastodon (even though some people around there can't seem to grasp that things change - yes Jack Dorsey founded BlueSky, but he was bullied so hard on his own platform, he left the entire company), but it still feels like too much of a foreign land for me to try and stake a place in.
I think just being away from social media for so long has re-wired me to the point where I have no interest in engaging with it, except in a strictly passive way. It's still an interesting source for news stories from around the globe that you might otherwise miss, which, I think, may be the single benefit of maintaining a presence on the platforms.
That and the shameless self-promotion that everyone ignores.
