The state of social media
Moving to focus on Bluesky was my solution to social media's fraught nature. Stackable moderation makes all the difference. Between the Aegis list, the screenshot dunk blocker, and the GIF blocker, I see almost nothing that causes undue stress.
It's a huge improvement over Mastodon, which I still post to but don't read much, where the only solutions tend to be move to another instance or block an entire instance, depending on the issue.
This bit nails why I pulled away from social media, and mostly stick to Bluesky with its excellent self-serve moderation tools, and started blogging again.
The short form of microblogging encourages us to be reductive about impossibly important topics that real people are losing their lives over right now. It’s like sports fans yelling about who their preferred team is. In contrast, long-form content — blogging, newsletters, platforms like Medium — leaves space to explore and truly debate. Whereas short-form is too low-resolution to capture the fidelity of the truth, long-form at least has the potential to be more representative of reality.
It’s great for jokes. Less so for war.
If I make a joke or rant, it goes wild. I even sold a sticker with one of my jokes!
Hundreds of favorites! Hundreds of boosts! Sticker sales! It paid for months of hosting for this place.
But what about the stuff that matters? Crickets. Almost no one read my very thoughtful treatment of the situation in Palestine. I tried to elucidate all sides while trying to keep the contemporary lines between oppressor and oppressed clear. One of my finer works. Chirp. But at least here I have room to write enough to know I did my best and feel good about the output.
If the important stuff is going to be ignored, it might as well be here on a blog/newsletter where I have room to run with ideas. Even the formidable 1024 characters afforded by Mastodon's tech.lgbt is too limiting for the serious stuff.
Social media has the weird effect of making you feel like you’ve achieved something — made a post, perhaps received some feedback — without actually having done anything at all. It sits somewhere between marketing and procrastination: a way to lose time into a black hole without anything to really show for it.
Ben Werdmuller