So it seems social is not exactly social anymore and Twitter, Reddit, etc are on fire, no not the cool meaning of that phrase just ablaze 🔥. A once great experiment to bring people together from all walks of life and every corner of the globe is over. (it’s a sphere I know but there’s probably cube-earthers out there arguing with flat-earthers)
The internet had such great potential but like most things these days any value it has is distilled down to ‘how can rich people make more money and have more control?’.
Facebook was always a terrible software platform that despite its vast income never improved and has been a source of misinformation and vileness for years. Instagram started well but in chasing profit when bought by Facebook (Meta) it was ruined by trying to turn it into every other platform out there all at once to kill competition. Now it stumbles along carrying too much baggage dropping bits of itself it can’t keep a hold of. TikTok is a political target so despite some fun stuff amongst the shady stuff it may not be somewhere to settle into and its video specific extrovert antics aren’t for everyone either. Snap’s great for the kids it seems but according to their own rules their audience shouldn’t be on it, but find a school classroom that isn’t. And Mastodon, the supposed Twitter lifeboat hasn’t sailed away with users as many thought it would with clunky usability and some grumpy original users getting snippy with new folks running over there. It needs money to compete but can’t realistically do that without compromising its mission so it’s a rock and a hard place for its hard working owner and his small team.
There’s lots of smaller networks and new start-ups of course you could try to call home. Tumblr somehow is still there and still weird which is both its appeal and what pushes people away.
Hive is new, bright and growing, and refreshingly run by a female entrepreneur and I wish her every success. However so far on trying that I’ve just been followed by Nicki Minaj ultra-stans which I’m afraid isn’t me lovely and enthusiastic as they are (I know absolutely none of her songs, not one 😬). Post will plateau like Medium if it hasn’t already and isn’t a Twitter replacement.
Reddit is currently on fire as its CEO openly hates on its users and the communities that actually make up his platform, the guy just can’t shut up the last few weeks and most likely will follow Musk in demanding money for the privilege of being verbally abused.
Ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has Bluesky but people seem to forget somehow that he’s as mad as a bag of cats and thinks Elon Musk is doing a superb job, so maybe avoid Bluesky as a brave new promised land of wonder, and he thinks Nazis should have a right to express themselves, what!?
So if Twitter was your main home as it was mine in one guise or another since 2009, where do you pack up your social connections to?
I haven’t a clue and it’s getting annoying 😡. Twitter in the last week with ‘rate limits’ that make it unusable, broken links on blogs like this if I used them siloing the service and ruining journalists connections built up over the years is irreparable under current management. Every asinine decision at Twitter has been designed to force you into giving Elon Musk money to rescue a service he single-handedly has destroyed in less than a year and flooded with his bigoted kinsmen and conspiracy theorists. It’s maddening but after a number of false starts where we all claimed ‘this is the end’ it seems we’re finally there out of greed and narcissism. Musk is no tech God or visionary he’s a successful flim-flam man who grinds up talented people and takes credit for their work, any small amount of reasonable research shows this. He’s just another billionaire people have elevated to a position of hope in a chaotic world because we’ve forgotten to look for that hope in ourselves, or become too lazy to try. That’s a different conversation though.
Is there a realistic Twitter competitor coming, and at what cost?
Mark wants to hold your hand.
Meta, has been scrambling for months to get its Instagram offshoot Threads ready to go and it arrives July 6th.
Being Meta of course it comes with a caveat that its a data vampire and people are already freaking out, however they probably already have Instagram, FB, or WhatsApp by funnily enough Meta so Mark Zuckerberg is already sitting on your sofa looking at your phone screen stroking your thigh, shudder 😑.
But that’s the price of that connection we’ve enjoyed with friends we may never meet in real life, though we should try. Will Threads work out, well it potentially has momentum as everything and everyone from Meta connected networks can slide into it, and with Twitter users getting desperate and no other viable alternative that isn’t niche Mark is probably rubbing his sweaty little hands at the thought of dribbling over your data. Yes he’ll sell it to advertisers, Russia if they’ve any money left to influence elections, healthcare insurers, etc, but that’s the world we live in for better or worse and that’s the cost.
It’s shameful that all of these networks that have literally saved lives not just in war zones, natural disasters or political uprisings for freedom, but in quiet moments when light fades from people’s eyes and a stranger reaches out a kind word, should be something people trade off, but that’s a bigger problem needing addressed.
I’ll give Threads a go, but I won’t do it blindly and hopefully I’ll see some friends over there if Musk finally shutters his own app to all but his Nazi friends and those who’ll stick $8 in his g-string.
His investors must be so happy… but then… if you want a conspiracy theory, maybe this was the plan all along, break peoples’ connections, and break the people, no Arab Spring, no Orange Revolution, no human rights activism. It would seem far fetched, but so is buying a $10 billion app for $44 billion and making sure no one wants to use it. Grab a tinfoil hat and pull up a chair! 🤪
