Social Media Update

I signed up for Substack’s Notes last week, which may have been a mistake. My inbox was immediately spammed with emails from the Substacks I was forced to sign up to as part of joining Notes. Several judicious unsubscribes and one spam identifier later, my inbox looks normal. Also last week, one of Substack’s owners was blindsided in an interview when he was asked about content moderation. Like any good Silicon Valley bro, he assumed that everyone would behave themselves. Notes looks like a discussion area for Substackers. Not much room for the rest of us.

Musk has announced changes to Twitter’s weighting of tweets, which I don’t intend to parse out. He’s gonna do what he’s gonna do, and engagement was never my primary reason for joining Twitter. My primary purpose is conversations – both mine and listening in on others. Twitter still has the biggest user base by far, and that will continue to be the reason I stick there. The exorbitant charges for the API went into effect, and storm and tsunami warnings, along with transit notices, were priced out for a while. Some of them may have been restored.

I am paying a bit more attention to Mastodon. A number of friends have totally moved over there, and others are posting on both Mastodon and Twitter. It remains a quirky site, run by many quirky server owners. Currently there is a fight between an entomologist who posts spider photos and a server owner (or someone) who insists that spider photos must have content warnings. One Musk is bad enough. I have also learned that Mastodon has an interface that is something like TweetDeck, without which I might leave social media, and that it is important to use hashtags. I haven’t spent enough time there to see if those make the site more interesting. Ultimately, though, it’s the number of people who use it.

Post still looks like Facebook posts from thousands of people I don’t know.

Spoutible is a competent Twitter clone with not enough users. A great many people seem to hate Christopher Bouzy, and this is another piece of drama I would be happy to do without.

Bluesky seems to be in a beta testing mode, available only through invitation. I have seen a few glowing comments, but each of the others has had a few glowing comments until people tried to use them more regularly.