I am going to be transitioning off of Twitter as my primary social media platform for myself and Belem Knight.
The reasons are somewhat obvious. Elon Musk is busy dynamiting his own business, by encouraging toxic actors and driving away advertisers by arbitrary, capricious and nonsensical decisions. (He is also busy expelling and driving away employees, who are a lot less replaceable than he thinks).
The results are already visible, via the re-appearance of assholes whose accounts were suspended, and the appearance of a lot of new accounts owned by fascists who have been emboldened by Musk’s pandering to their worldview.
A social media platform is only as good as its community. Musk does not care about community. He wants to have a platform that reflects his own worldview, which is deeply authoritarian and contemptuous of intellect.
So, I will be leaving. My new social media account is already visible in my Twitter profile name.
The question is: to where?
Modern social networks can be loosely sorted by paradigm. There are networks optimized for images and video, and networks optimized for text. Older networks tend to have a UI based on text, with images and video as add-ins. Newer networks operate the other way round.
Text –> Images – Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin, Mastodon (including counter.social)
Images–> Text – InstaGram, TikTok, Ello and SnapChat.
Another question, the most important one for me, is whether my data and personal data will be sold to third parties, and whether the platform tries to assert IP rights over content that I post.
Most of the legacy platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin assert IP ownership over everything you post. This is one reason why I still maintain blogs elsewhere on the internet. Giving a link is not giving away my IP.
I stopped using Facebook in 2018, because it is a toxic platform that negligently allowed its push algorithms to be gamed by bad actors. Linkedin is a work platform. When people engage in politics on there, it gets ugly because there is no content moderation. Ello is an image-dominant platform without critical mass.
The Fediverse platforms based on Mastodon do not assert IP ownership and do not sell my data. This is a big positive for them. The downside is that the user interface is not state of the art.
A lot of people used to Twitter and TikTok are struggling and complaining about the UI paradigm and features of Mastodon. Some of the complaints are missing an important difference between Twitter and Mastodon. Twitter works on a Push approach, exposing users to what content they think you will find interesting. This reduces the work of a user, but means that users can be “gamed” via bias in information serving. Mastodon has a Pull approach, where you go find the information that you want. As a self-seeker, I have limited sympathy for folks who will not get off their posteriors and find information. They are asking to be propagandized.
New Platforms are appearing all the time. The upside is choices (the wonder of the world huh?). The downside is that some of the platforms are 2-men and a dog operations, with little to no track record. Some of them are attempting to emulate TikTok, which does not interest me, since I deal primarily in text, not images. (I have an Instagram account for images).
My main criteria for a social network platform are (in order of importance):
- Community – the communities to which I belong have a significant number of articulate thinkers and posters who create interesting content
- Norm enforcement – the platform supports content moderation to the extent necessary to marginalize or eliminate trolls and bots
- Critical Mass – there are enough interesting people to make it worthwhile for me to spend my time there
I put Critical Mass at #3 because, beyond a certain level, having millions of people on a social network is not an advantage because of the facts of mass adoption. Late adopters tend to be technology and platform laggards with little or nothing to say. A disproportionate number of late adopters are, to be blunt, wastes of bandwidth. We can see that right now on Twitter and Facebook. I would prefer a smaller community like The Well, than a massive sprawling community with quality and moderation problems. The Well was very self-selecting, in that fools knaves and incompetents were soon ignored and disappeared because they could not gain traction.
For now, my new primary location will be counter.social/@rupertramsgate. I picked counter.social because it has the same approach to not selling data as Mastodon (it is based on Mastodon) but also has numerous extra features that basically eliminate spam. Counter.social is not currently federated with Mastodon (which is a downside), because the de facto owner of Mastodon is a wee bit dictatorial and too idealistic for his own good (he’ll learn).
I am testing out two possible other locations:
smutlandia.com/@rupertramsgate – This is a Mastodon instance, but federated with the rest of Mastodon worldwide. It may gain critical mass with erotica authors over time. I will monitor it.
hivesocial.app – I am experimenting with this platform (which only has a phone client) to see if it will be a longer-term replacement for Twitter.