Article: Antisocial Social Media

In some downtime around Christmas activities, I found myself embarking on a little project—winding down and tidying up my social media. Don’t worry, this won’t be a let’s-quit-social-media-for-mental-health posts, nor will it be a shame-on-you-for-sticking-with-a-particular-service post. There have been way too many words written about either already. Instead, I wanted to share some thoughts on my project and how it’s affected the web sites I run.

While I got off Facebook long ago, Twitter X and Instagram were more recent in 2023. I got sick of the back-and-forth threats about a ban or sale of TikTok, as well as the worsening algorithm, so that went back in October. All that was left were three Mastodon accounts: a personal one, one for this site, and one for my other site, The Chaos League. It also has a companion Bluesky account, as it seems most of “sports Twitter” (including NWSL/women’s soccer) moved there instead of Mastodon.

The genesis of this project was a post that was boosted and went a little viral, which then led to way too many comments that just didn’t grasp my initial point, but were quick to tell me I was wrong and looking to argue. While I’d like to think I have a fairly thick skin and have learned long ago that it’s okay to admit when one is wrong, it was just a waste of my time and irritating. I’m too old to be arguing with strangers on the internet. Why was it worth giving access and my time to people who didn’t know me and didn’t want to take the time to get to know me, even from simply scrolling older posts?

First, I was carrying around thousands of posts, replies, boosts, and other nonsense on my personal account that just weren’t really that relevant. Between the automatic deletion feature and cleaning things on my own, I was able to cut things down to a fraction of what was before and anything kept is mostly for posterity—if I look at it again or someone who follows me scrolls backwards, would they enjoy it? Would it stand the test of time? I think from now on, I’ll use the service in two ways: ephemeral communication with some online pals (that will eventually delete) and sharing things I enjoy that will stick around.

Next, it was time to evaluate the companion Mastodon account for this site. To be honest, engagement hasn’t been great, nor was it particularly great on prior attempts, such as Facebook. I get a lot of views from RSS and people simply going to the site. Once I weeded out the dormant Mastodon accounts from my follows, it was rather…disappointing (we had a big uptick right after everyone was looking for Twitter alternatives and it dried up soon after). I made the (maybe) rash decision to simply delete the account—of the few people that were left, I knew a handful were following through other means and this eliminated something to maintain—the auto-posting plugin from WordPress, not to mention another account.

Finally, came time to evaluate the situation for The Chaos League and that’s been the most challenging. Mastodon engagement is quite disappointing—since most of the various official entities never set up shop there, journalists and writers didn’t either, so it’s basically a few enthusiastic fans. While that’s great, the amount of reposts and interactions I do from the account are also rather small, especially compared with Bluesky. For a multitude of reasons, I don’t love Bluesky, but that seems to be where the NWSL/women’s soccer crowd has shifted and there’s just much more content. I set up a “bridge” that allows Mastodon folks to see what’s getting posted on Bluesky, but as far as they’re concerned, it’s a separate account (I can’t combine my two disconnected audiences.) Additionally, I learned that some Mastodon instances block Bluesky and/or bridging entirely, so I’d be cutting off some people.

In this case, I thought I’d experiment with bridging, but set some very specific goals for each place: the native account on Mastodon is almost entirely just automatic posts from the site and maybe weekly broadcast schedule posts. Bluesky is basically primary, and if you follow the bridged Bluesky account on Mastodon, you can basically get everything. Maybe I’ll eventually phase out the native Mastodon account, but for now, it’s still serving somewhat of a purpose.

During this whole exercise, I realize that my interest in social media has shifted once again. Previously, I had been trying to get away from algorithmic feeds and go back to a reverse-chronological timeline (part of the reason why I used Twitterrific and Tweetbot instead of the official Twitter app), but now I’m kind of sick of a lot of services that just leave a trail of content that will just exist unless I prune it. We’re so quick to keep recreating timelines, but I’d be much more open to something like the old MySpace setup—you get one page and you can put whatever you want on it and that’s it. I find services like SpaceHey intriguing, but getting all my friends to join and recreate the MySpace days just realistically won’t happen. Maybe it’s better that it didn’t wear out it’s welcome?

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