22 Comments
May 1, 2023Liked by John Birmingham

It's a bit of a shame. I tried mastodon but it didnt really grab me. I have IG for a photo blog and started a vero one because IG was getting on my nerves but its mellowed a bit lately. Vero was very clunky to use and i find not very community focused - chat in that thing is horrendous. You get enough chats for one pat on the back and thats it - discourse is impossible. FB as well is just for those specialist groups like community groups etc. What were we saying about a moment in time in a previous post?

Expand full comment
May 1, 2023Liked by John Birmingham

Being a fan of F1 and cycling, but not a fan of getting up in the middle of the night and paying a subscription to watch them, Twitter is a good place to follow. I can either check on it if I wake up or catch up on all the blow by blow and post race gossip in the morning.

Other than that, I just kind of drift over the rest of the stuff unless something catches my eye.

Expand full comment

Yeah, I'm over it, too. Deleted.

Expand full comment

My feed still seems ok, but I probably don't have a sufficient following to attract the nastier elements. I set up a Spoutible account when that was established but so far it's mostly American focused and, being a political tragic, focused on the bin fire that is US politics so far, so I find myself drifting back to Twitter again and again. Plus I could never give up Twitter while Damo and I can share tweets and snark at everyone in our DMs. And Cat and Dog Twitter are still pure and adorable as heck.

I do find it ironic that people are looking at Bluesky as the answer to all their problems. If a Twitter rival set up by the guy that made Twitter an inconsistent arbiter of free speech and then facilitated its sale to Space Karen is the answer, I'm not sure I want to know what the question is.

My hope as a Twitter tragic is that it will somehow outlast Space Karen's attention span.

Expand full comment

Facebook has just gone all advertising. Scam advertising, wishful thinking advertising, waste your money advertising your terrible art which looks like a scam , but is actually a scam from Facebook selling advertising for wishful thinking. Twitter just made me sad, the posts from people making endless headline assumptions about their assumptions , without questioning or interrogating those assumptions before posting. A drug fuelled Jordan Peterson acting like he's jesus , even after saying you can't be jesus was reasonably entertaining except it ended up detracting from the good points he made about rubbish degrees and idiotic sceptical French philosophy.

Expand full comment

Don't use either, and don't feel I'm missing anything

Expand full comment

Still on twitter, still check it. Sort of like an RSS, I use one of those as well - Old Reader. I agree its has gotten worse since Elon took over.

Expand full comment

Mastodon is working fine for me - I chose a site more or less at random and it's been ok so far. I don't notice the maze of federated sites because it all just works - or it doesn't - and I see what I see and that's enough. Hardest part has been tracking down all the interesting follows on twitter and finding them again on Mastodon.

I still browse twitter (after running out of Mastodon posts to read). Signal to noise is definitely much worse than it was. My feed was already fairly well curated, mostly following sane-ish people, so not too much white supremacist bs etc, even now. But I have to wade through a lot of people saying the exact same thing much more than I used to, so it's becoming much less worth the time invested.

Expand full comment

I never bothered with it, so am feeling smug. Sadly, I have to use Fbook for work.

Expand full comment

I was a lurker for #auspol, never joined though. Then it got crazy nasty, then it refused access to non-twitterers. Oh well, what the hell, Musk just saved me from the timesuck.

Expand full comment

Maybe it will die out but I doubt it. Not many leaving who claimed they would. Elon did a great thing turning the files over to Tailibi and Shellenberger and Bari Weiss. Lots of great stuff on substack from all of them. Social media is mostly crap anyway. Facebook too lest we forget the genesis of that site. They would all be better off opening their algorithms up like Elon did but that’s not going to happen. Substack notes seems decent so far. We’ll see

Expand full comment