Today, I signed up for Bluesky and Threads, taking a brief look at each of them, and announced my final departure from Twitter, to take place when Musk removes the Block feature[1]. Meanwhile I’m still using Mastodon as my main microblog along with this blog and Crooked Timber for long-form blogging. I’m trying to maintain a couple of Substack newsletters and commenting on Substack Notes. And I still post occasionally on Facebook.
This is clearly too much, but it reflects the transition from the Facebook-Twitter era of “social media” (with blogs as a holdover from a more optimistic past) to whatever comes next. I’m going to make the case for a combination of Mastodon and Substack as the way forward.
Mastodon isn’t perfect (clunky interface, and deliberately low-key), but the starting point of the Fediverse is the right one, in two crucial respects.
First, there is no owner and no advertising. We’ve seen the disastrous effects of advertising-driven management with FB and Twitter, and I can’t see any way to fix them.
Second, and probably more importantly, it’s the polar opposite of the assumption that everyone should be, and has a presumptive right to be, on the same platform. You join an instance you like, with confidence that anyone behaving badly will be thrown out. You can then link with other instances which follow the same rules. Instances that deviate too badly will be defederated. The result is that, whereas I use Twitter’s block all the time, I’ve never had to block anyone on Mastodon.
The result of these rules is that there is a lot less debate. I’m happy with that. I see no value in arguing with rightwingers, and not much with reply-guys in general. YMMV.
Turning to Substack, it is in many respects, a renewal of old-style long form blogging, but with email newsletters as a central feature. The big difference is the subscription model, under which only paying readers get unrestricted access to the newsletter and, often, to features like comments. That reduces the amount of interaction between writers and readers and, particularly among writers. The Notes feature is a step towards more interaction, but hasn’t yet taken off. A silver lining is that, at least for me, the existence of far-right substacks has barely impinged on the experience.
The subscription model is, I think, unavoidable. The starting point is the recognition, evident from the decline of the original blogging model, that most people don’t have the free time and energy to write regularly for no monetary return. As Dr Johnson put it (from memory) ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’.[2] Once that’s recognised, it’s better to get a return from subscriptions than from advertising.
For the moment, I’m spreading myself far too thinly across lots of media, waiting to see what emerges from the current chaos. How about you?
fn1. Being Musk, he may not go through with it. And I’ve seen suggestions that some combination of EU laws and the requirements of the Apple store make a block option unavoidable.
fn2. Academics like me and (most of) the CT crew are a special case. Communicating with the public is part of the job, at least as I understand it.
John Quiggin 
I was really glad to read this.
In an atomised world, I wondered if others had observed these cyberspace, things have evolved over this very strange century.
As for computer-ology, I was left behind ages ago. Once free and eager for participation, now the coin has landed on the side.
And no, blogs ARE relevant, reading thinking and writing, cannot understand why many say online is necessarily poor compared to legacy media and press. I don’t recall the better blogspots censoring out substantial news, either.
As JQ posted on CT “The fragmentation of new media”.
“John Q 08.23.23 at 1:21 am
Phil @13 Blogs were originally very like Twitter. A link to something interesting, and a brief comment.”, I suppose I am a blog bogger.
None so blind…
Musk says of the response to ceasing the block function… ““It makes no sense,.” (^2. Huffpo last week). And a classic Musk – “We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one.” – revealing his messiah complex by thinking at least one – His 1 – the only person capable of supplying social media. In the same breath stating “We may fail…”. And dissolve $44bn along the way.
Imagine a dating site having no block user feature. It would be a harassment site.
Yet twitter – “X” also facilitates harassment, as evidenced by Huffpo piece, and the survey of scientists in this Nature editorial…
“Thousands of scientists are cutting back on Twitter, seeding angst and uncertainty
16 August 2023
…
“Nature reached out to more than 170,000 scientists who were, or still are, users; nearly 9,200 responded. More than half reported that they have reduced the time they spend on the platform in the past six months and just under 7% have stopped using it altogether. Roughly 46% have joined other social-media platforms, such as Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and TikTok.”
…
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02554-0
“Elon Musk Says It’s Possible That X ‘May Fail’
…
“ The sad truth is that there are no great ‘social networks’ right now,” Musk posted on the site. “We may fail, as so many have predicted, but we will try our best to make there be at least one.”
…
“It makes no sense,” Musk posted on the platform.
…
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-says-possible-x-fail_n_64e271d3e4b02dac6d5ef2b3
Musk sized cognitive dissonance.
*
What is the opportunity cost of the $44bn?
On CT…
Moz in Oz @12 “red queen race” is apt. Leading to Social Risk.
J, not that one @18, I too… “concede that might be 99.99% of the population, and that I’m the one who’s the outlier.”
Had I not been able to read (at a still “golden blog” -CT) I never would have known who Cheryl Rofer is. Hi and thanks. Nor found “Making Sense Of Elon Musk” at her site riffing off Jason Steinhauer’s piece “Making sense of Elon Musk. How the billionaire’s long-held views are shaping the future of Twitter” [linked]
December 19 by Cheryl Rofe
From Jason Steinhauer’s post:
“… on the website of the Founders Fund, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley run by investor Peter Thiel—who created PayPal with Elon Musk—resides the sentence, “The entrepreneurs who make it have a near-messianic attitude and believe their company is essential to making the world a better place.” To be a savior of society is foundational to the ethos of tech, Elon Musk foremost among them.
“Thiel and Musk share another commonality, namely that they are both subscribers and large donors to a school of thought known as “long-termism.” Long-termism emerged principally out of Oxford University and is considered by one observer to be the “most dangerous secular belief system in the world today.” Long-termism has a messianic religiosity about it, a belief that humanity has an ordained and glorious future ahead of it that must be reached at all costs. In this view, today’s wars, deaths, famines, starvations, racial and civil injustices and all other maladies are blips on the cosmic calendar. What really matters is re-engineering our bodies to create a superior race of post-humans that can colonize other planets in order to expand humanity across the known galaxy.”
~ end Steinhauer ~
Mesaianic, as a one word summary of Thiel and Musk, is hard to beat. As a theory “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” seems easy to defend if applied to Musk & Thiel:
“Research has pointed that agreeableness is exceedingly low translating to lack of empathy and altruism. NPD is characterized by a life-long pattern of:
✓ exaggerated feelings of self-importance (grandiosity)
✓ an excessive need for admiration
✓ a delusional sense of status
✓ diminished ability or unwillingness to empathize with others’ feelings, and
✓ interpersonally exploitative behavior.
(Wikipedia.)
Steinhauer’s piece ends with “As media literate information consumers and planetary citizens, it will be incumbent upon us to decide if those agendas and values align with our own.”… which I assume is part if the reasin JQ has posted this. Is it JQ?
Musk takes “Social Risk Positions are social positions that are dictated by the ability to avert risk. They are largely dependent on an individual’s ability to access knowledge”. Wikipedia
He is averting ‘his’ perception of risk as he is a fan of; “Long-termism has a messianic religiosity about it, a belief that humanity has an ordained and glorious future ahead of it that must be reached at all costs. In this view, today’s wars, deaths, famines, starvations, racial and civil injustices and all other maladies are blips on the cosmic calendar.” Wikipedia.
Imagine imagining that today’s wars etc are to be ignored for “an ordained and glorious future ahead of it that must be reached at all costs.”
And so we reach peak “Narcissistic Personality Disorder” providing a basis for some of the “The fragmentation of new media”.
This post is, imo, an example of applied utility. Efficient. Maybe some thoughts re effectiveness too.
3 types.
“But fragmentation can also be conceptualized at the level of individuals and audiences, revealing different features of the phenomenon. Webster and Ksiazek have argued there are three types of fragmentation:
-media-centric,
– user-centric, and
– audience-centric [2] ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audience_fragmentation
2.
The Dynamics of Audience Fragmentation: Public Attention in an Age of Digital Media Get access
James G. Webster, Thomas B. Ksiazek
Journal of Communication, Volume 62, Issue 1, February 2012, Pages 39–56,
https://academic.oup.com/joc/article-abstract/62/1/39/4085792
“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’” — or a member of the over-educated precariat hoping (almost certainly in vain) to one day monetise a side hustle
Old blogs never fragment, they…
“WordPress now has a 100-year domain registration option”
https://www.siliconrepublic.com/business/wordpress-domain-registration-100-years
[…] Source link […]
“Saving the news from Big Tech
…
“But in truth, tech is stealing news publishers’ money.
…
“But whenever these firms are investigated by regulators, there’s abundant evidence of rampant, shameless self-dealing. Consider Google/Meta’s illegal, collusive ‘Jedi Blue’ program to rig the ad market; or Facebook’s infamous “pivot to video,” a fraud that deceived publishers into spending billions financing the company’s bid to launch a YouTube competitor, whose failure precipitated the implosion of dozens of otherwise healthy news companies.
“Policymakers have lost patience with exotic explanations of Google/Meta’s incredible margins. In the US, the AMERICA Act — whose bipartisan sponsors are an unlikely coalition that includes both Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Ted Cruz — would force Google and Meta to divest their conflicting units. Each company would have to decide whether to be a marketplace, a sellers’ agent, or a buyers’ agent, and shed the other business units.
“Meanwhile the EU has announced its own intention to seek Google’s breakup on similar lines, for similar reasons.
“Surveillance is bad for news, too
…
“By contrast, reforming advertising, payments and social media will prevent Big Tech from claiming those profits in the first place,
…
https://euobserver.com/opinion/157187