I've had a twitter account for a while. I've gone to using it a lot, trying to gain some kind of following, to using it sparingly, trying to disanct myself from social media in general, to using it a lot again when seeing people in person became more difficult. Now that it's under new ownership and its future appears uncertain it's time for me to reasses my relationship with twitter, and, to a greater extent, social media in general.
What is social media? 'Sites and services that facilitate sharing ideas and conversations' is an imperfect definition, but one that seems to come up a lot. Sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are some examples of what I think of when I think about social media. But what are they, really? At their core, sites like the big three I listed are like giant firehoses of information where everyone is spraying continously and simultaneously. It's a huge cacophonous pile of sludge and it's your job to figure out which parts to listen to and which parts to ignore.
You might start by searching for your friends in the sludge pile. You might even invite some other friends to join you in the sludge pile because the sludge pile lets you all talk to each other. You could communicate with each other before, of course (that's how you invited them to the sludge pile to start with), but once you're all in the same sludge pile, it's so much easier.
Any why stop at talking with just your friends? Eventually, it turns out, celebrities are sometimes people, too, and they are also in the sludge pile, ostensibly to talk with their friends, but also to promote themselves. So are prominent people in almost every field or walk of life. They're probably not interested in what I, a random nobody, has to say, but I, a starstruck random nobody, might be intensely interested in what a prominent person might have to say about anything and everything, so I might listen to a few more spots on the sludge pile.
Meanwhile, the architects of the sludge pile work tirelessly to bring more people into the morass and encourage the people in it to produce ever increasing amounts of sludge. They're not doing this because they love humanity and love bringing people together. They're doing it to make money. Businesses are also contributing muck to the sludge pile, and they can pay the architects to make you listen to their part of the sludge pile. It's brief, at first. A momentary interruption to your blissful routine of swimming in a sea of sludge, filtering out the pearls from the muck and putting them in your pearl-collecting bag. In this analogy, you don't actually own your own pearl-collecting bag. It's got your name on it and you spend hours, days, years, deciding what goes into it, except that you're only renting it and paying for it with your attention. Because there's a hole in the bottom of the bag where the real owner gets to put into it whatever pearls they want and you have no say in the matter. Does it matter that one out of every hundred pearls isn't actually one that you wanted, but was actually put there because someone paid someone else to stick it in your bag? What if it's one out of fifty? One out of ten? One out of two?
Most of the big social media sites as they exist today are ad delivery platforms (we could extend that to most of the modern internet, but that's another entry for another day). Even if they don't start out that way, building and running big platforms costs a lot of money, and once the siren call of advertisements is heard, it's tough to resist. This is where the Fediverse comes in.
The Fediverse is similarly-ill-defined as social media, but I think of it like a bunch of smaller, independent sludge piles (some are sludgier than others), where you either pick an exising sludge pile to see if the kind of sludge they produce is a kind that you like, or you can set up your own. You can also attach your sludge pile to someone else's sludge pile through something called ActivityPub. But you don't have to limit yourself to just aping Twitter. The Fediverse can pump out updates in a variety of formats: video clips, audio clips, blogs, forums, etc. all blended together into a slurry that isn't beholden to The Algorithm or advertisers.
There are problems (there are always problems). Some of the problems seem fixable. Some seem intractable. Some have been amplified by the massive influx of new users who don't know what's going on (does it count as an Eternal September if it started in October?), most of which are expecting The Fediverse (and, really, Mastodon in particular) to be a drop-in replacement for Twitter. It isn't, and it shouldn't be, but it may be crowbarred into a Twitter-like shape as more and more people jump into instances and realize that it isn't Twitter.
But even then, even if The Fediverse manages to shed its Twitter baggage and become its own thing, is that what I want? More specifically, is that something that I want to participate in? Social media makes is money by showing ads. They're designed to keep you scrolling forever because the more you scroll, the more ads you see and the more money the platform makes. This is known. If you take away the ad incentive (and, let's be honest here, just because the Fediverse doesn't have ads on it now doesn't mean that it never will) and the algorithm that's designed to keep you there, what do you have? You have a neverending feed of things to look at, things to comment on, things to keep you entertained for as long as you want.
But is that what I want? Do I want to trade Twitter for another, slightly different Twitter? I turn off auto-play everywhere I can. I turn off recommendations everywhere that will let me. I refuse to sign in to websites if I can help it. Do I want to dose myself with a steady drip of dopamine? Even if I'm fully in charge of the formulation?
I haven't decided if I've reached a conclusion on this or if I have reached a conclusion but I won't let my brain tell me what it is. Negotiations are ongoing.