The health of the major legacy social media platforms and the new platforms continues to decline.
Twitter has become a sinkhole of fascist, racist and assholish ranting. I just wish my few remaining friends there would get the Hell out.
Threads is part of Meta, whose content moderation is negligible, consisting mainly of algorithms that consistently mis-identify innocuous postings as hate, while postings actually containing assholish or threatening content seem to escape. The CEO of Threads is now groveling unctuously to Donald Trump, which is a very bad sign. Many people on Threads have noticed an influx of junk accounts, and are shifting to BlueSky.
Instagram is also part of Meta. My expectations are identical to those for Threads. IOW, very low.
Facebook is a wasteland, except for the odd bit of family chit-chat. Now we find that the platform intends to pretty much abandon moderation and allow more political content. Gotta pander to the new monarch.
BlueSky. Ah. BlueSky. I had hopes that the founders would have learned enough from watching the rise and fall of other networks to be able to do things sufficiently differently to escape the same fate.
Alas, no. They have failed to prevent the predicted influx of botnets, sex bots and trolls. It’s way too late to prevent people pissing on your living room carpet when they are already inside the house. I found 14 Follows on my primary account this morning, 12 were from bots and tolls. Only 2 were what you might term genuine accounts, accounts with actual postings of interest. This lack of gatekeeping at the front door is ensuring that the signal to noise ratio is going to rapidly deteriorate.
Meanwhile over at my primary social network, Counter.social, the front door is curated to prevent the trash from having to be taken out later. Life is peaceful. I have blocked one account in the last 6 months.
There is no positive future for US-based large social media networks. We can expect the Trump administration to interfere with online speech just the way that they intend to interfere with the whole of the Federal government. These are not smart people. They are the kids that used to vandalize bus shelters in my home town.