Thoughts on Social Networks
Things keep shifting around in the social media world, and so I find myself again trying to sort out where I want to put time and energy into and which services are most likely to hit critical mass and survive.
The newest entry: Threads, from Meta (aka Facebook). It launched a very-much V1.0 basic product in the last couple of weeks, and did one very smart thing, which was tie it to your Instagram account, which meant it started out with a large potential user base with very little friction to start using it. Which lots of people did, although, as is normal, that usage then drops off again after “new toy” mode starts wearing off a bit.
Now, I’m well known as “not a fan of Meta or Zuckerberg”, and in fact, I tossed my Facebook account into the dumpster a few years back and after dabbled in Instagram twice and never liking it, chose not to have an account there, either, because, well, Meta and Zuckerberg were toxic and destructive and I wanted nothing to do with them.
That said, I will admit that with the launch of threads, I went and created an account for both it and Instagram so I could get a feel for them.
Has my view of Meta/Zuckerberg changed? Yes, somewhat. I still see him and Meta as basically evil, but… The ongoing financial black hole disaster that is their Oculus/VR debacle continues with no end in sight, and they’ve seen massive pushback on political defeats around their overall business practices, and what I saw in terms of their plans and policies for Threads seems, almost, thoughtful. In watching the company over the last few months, I sense a change of tone — the word I’m tempted to use is chastened — at least a bit. I still don’t trust them or particularly like them, but it’s unclear to me they’re any more evil these days than Google is, and I’m still very much in the “yes, I use Google for things” camp. So, since it feels to me like the fight for dominant social media platforms now boils down to whether Twitter will hang on or Threads will take over, I feel like I want to bet on Threads.
It should be noted, by the way, that any negative thoughts I might have had about Zuckerberg have been dwarfed by what Elon Musk has done to Twitter and to us. In the grand scheme of things, I am a lot more annoyed by Musk these days than Zuck. It should also be noted that a key player behind Bluesky is Jack Dorsey, formerly of Twitter, and is one of the people who invested non-trivial amounts of money in the venture that allowed Musk to finance buying Twitter. His attachment to Bluesky is one of the things that discourages me from wanting to use it — and to be honest, I wonder if part of the long tail plan all along was for elon to ultimately buy Bluesky and hand Twitter back to Dorsey. Which would not make me want to use Twitter again, all things considered.
The other candidates? Well, Bluesky has simply not impressed me, although it wasn’t as forgettable as Post was. And if Threads was intended to take on (and take down) Twitter, it simply obliterates any chance Bluesky has in gaining any traction. I have, in fact, deleted the app and no longer monitor it.
My opinion on Mastodon hasn’t changed, and you can read that in my June 6FPS essay titled Preachy, although I expect the title will give you the basics. Mastodon will not replace either Threads or Twitter in the mainstream (and it seems like after the initial enthusiasm wore off, user interest has shifted back towards Twitter again). It will continue to be the primary home for a primarily geek/nerd audience, and it’ll do fine as that, as long as you tune out the probably forever political infighting over “appropriate” uses for the platform by the nerds. In other words, it’s a new, modern IRC, not a replacement for Twitter. And the world is big enough that it can be quite successful carving out this niche and allowing the nerds to continue to feel superior to the mundanes that “don’t get it” by continuing to use one of those other stupid services.
For me, for now, I continue to use Mastodon as my primary hang-out space, although I’m not there as often as I might have been in the past. I am not yet advertising myself on either Instagram or Threads, since I don’t really know how much I plan on using them, but if I had to decide today, I think I’ll mostly use Instagram read-only and following other photographers there, and I probably will at some point start posting to and spending more time on Threads, but god, using an iPhone app on the iPad is so painful it doesn’t make me want to. Here’s hoping some good IOS apps for it show up. So for now, I’m not linking to the accounts and I’m not encouraging you to connect to me there.
In conversation with a friend the other day I realized there’s one social network I use, and it’s one that is large, well-established, stable, and, well, nobody ever seems to talk about it.
That network is NextDoor, or as it’s known around here, “The Karen Network”. Around here it seems to be about half notices of dogs or cats that have gotten out and gone missing, and half old people lecturing the rest of us how things were so much better in 1976 and how we youngsters have screwed it all up. You can well imagine just how much fun it was aorund July 4 with all the lecturing about how fireworks were being used in ways they don’t approve up. I watch Nextdoor because there are just enough things of interest there locally to warrant some attention, but god, there’s no way I’d ever dive into any of the discussions there.
Speaking as an official old, watching the olds around my literally yelling at the clouds about whatever is annoying them at the moment is sometimes amusing, and mostly sad. And may I never look in the mirror and see myself doing that…
