Social Media Update

Elon Musk is well along in his project to destroy Twitter. Recent developments are removing headlines from links and publishing only a graphic that can be clicked on, and his recommendation of two antisemitic disinformation accounts as the ones to follow for news of events in Israel. He deleted the latter tweet after it reached over a million views and considerable numbers of people had pointed out the nature of the accounts. Reports are that it is no longer possible to follow news on Twitter in the sea of disinformation. Margaret Sullivan gives a number of specific examples.

I am now using Twitter only for direct messages. I don’t want to even see in passing the horror videos playing on it.

Removing headlines removes a great deal of utility. Workarounds are possible, but nobody is using them. Even before that, I was seeing less and less from the accounts I value. That is partly because those people, like me, are posting less, and partly because of the way Musk has gummed up the timeline.

Invite codes are widely available for Bluesky, and more of the accounts I value are showing up there. It has around a million and a half users, and communities of interest are forming. It is becoming more useful for quick-moving news, although it still lacks video. Reply guys are arriving, but the ethos is to block them rather than engage. Kevin Kruse, the historian with a half-million followers, has left Twitter decisively, and there is an account that seems to be Paul Krugman that seems not far behind.

This week, referrals to posts on Nuclear Diner were more from Bluesky than from Twitter. Bluesky also lacks direct messages.

I have two big questions about Bluesky that the developers have avoided. The first is about federation. It was a big subject of discussion when I arrived in April – federation would take place in only a few days! But federation has not taken place, and everyone is still on one big server. The developers’ excitement about federation was not shared by anyone who has tried Mastodon, and others have no idea what they are talking about.

What did take center stage away from federation was trust and safety, the social media term for moderation and keeping the Nazis out. Late April saw a blowup about obviously anti-Black accounts that convinced the developers to concentrate on trust and safety. Federation would have thrown that to the individual server managers, who can be quirky about such things. The Mastodon answer is a complicated business that excludes some servers and I’ve never understood the rest. Keeping the Nazis out, it seems to me, requires a central code that excludes Nazis and removes those exhibiting Nazi-like behavior. (To oversimplify slightly)

The developers did a moderately good job of fixing the holes in trust and safety, although they alienated some users.

By and large, users want a safe service they don’t have to think about. That is not federation. The developers have been pushed into something much more like the Twitter model, a centralized service. Do they plan to keep that going?

The other question is how the developers plan to monetize the site. Currently it has no advertising and no subscription charge. I would be pleased if the funders continued to keep it that way, but I do not expect them to. These two questions could be generalized to “What is the overall plan for Bluesky?”

I continue to be surprised at some of the accounts I see on Twitter. Journalists have to hawk their stuff, I guess, and governmental accounts will have a certain level of inertia. A great many journos have accounts on Twitter and Bluesky, and a noticeable number are moving toward Bluesky. Some organizations, particularly academic societies, are moving to Bluesky.

Daniel Drezner has more in his good-bye to Twitter, including a great many links to other articless.

I’ll let Thomas Rid, disinformation specialist at Johns Hopkins, sum it up from his Bluesky account.

Cross-posted to Nuclear Diner