Social paths and detours

(This should probably be titled Assorted musings on social media, part 2)

I have this writing habit where, even when I know what I want to talk about in an article, I first have to come up with a good title. The title for me is like the act of turning the car key and starting the engine. I knew I wanted to talk about Twitter, what to do with it right now, people’s behaviours, Twitter alternatives, but all these things didn’t form a cohesive spot I could shine a comprehensive light (the title) on, so I guess we’re stuck with this somewhat vague Social paths and detours.

Obligatory reference

One of the reasons why I can’t seem to write on this blog as often as I’d like is that certain tech topics I care about routinely resurface and I realise that the debate around them retreads the same ground and points discussed previously, and so I often stare at an article I’d like to respond to, and say to myself, I’ve already talked about this. They’re still talking about this, and nothing has changed or improved since the last time. I would only end up repeating myself. This is why you haven’t heard me talking about the iPad’s identity crisis in a while. It’s the same crisis as before. The iPad got lost around 2013 and it’s still lost in the woods, even if it can run faster now.

With Twitter and social media, I feel I have little to add to my previous piece Assorted musings on social media, written in October 2021. You should go and read that in its entirety. What I’m going to do here is just add a few updated notes and observations based on the most recent debate surrounding the current state of Twitter.

An involuntarily hypocritical position

Elon Musk is a polarising figure, and the questionable way he’s currently managing Twitter has led many people to look elsewhere for their social media needs. Some have already left Twitter for other platforms — mostly Mastodon. Some, like myself, are keeping accounts here and there in a wait-and-see approach. These days, in private, I’ve been asked directly why I’m still on Twitter, given how terrible and doomed and politically unbalanced it’s becoming under the new management. In coming up with a response, I really sounded like those people I had urged in the past to leave Facebook and close up their accounts. Yes, the main reason I’m not leaving Twitter behind at the moment is the network of people that has been building around me in the almost 15 years I’ve been on the platform.

The similarities between these two paths and dynamics — leaving Facebook behind and leaving Twitter behind — are quite strong. I contend that one important difference I always perceived and still perceive is that, while I think someone leaving Facebook could find solid alternatives to keep in touch with the people they interacted with within Facebook’s walls, I’m not equally sure someone leaving Twitter can find (at the moment) a solid alternative offering the same experience Twitter offers (I’m obviously talking about the positives, not the toxicity and aggravation).

I realise I’m probably sounding a bit hypocritical here, but the truth is that I’m conflicted. I still feel I was doing the right thing when I tried to evangelise friends and acquaintances against Facebook. (And when one of those acquaintances recently said to me, Now you fully understand how I was feeling when you criticised me for being reluctant to quit Facebook, I reacted by saying that actually even back then I understood how difficult it was). At the same time I’m (hopefully) known to be a man of principle, and given that I’m no fan of Mr Musk or the people he enables, I should just refuse on principle to keep staying on Twitter and I should seek out greener and less toxic pastures.

But it’s not that clear-cut. Especially for someone like me whose experience on Twitter has been consistently exceptionally positive over the years, without the slightest hint of toxicity.

Interesting behavioural phenomena

There are many points I can agree with in Jeff Johnson’s piece I don’t want to go back to social media, but there are some excerpts where I couldn’t be on a more different page.

He writes:

I’m old enough to have lived half my adult life before Twitter existed, and to be honest, I feel that life before Twitter was better. The untweeted life is worth living! When you become a DAU (Daily Active User), you give up a lot of your time and energy to Twitter. Keeping up with your feed and your notifications becomes a compulsion. Your schedule almost revolves around it. What I’ve found after quitting Twitter is that in some sense I have my life back. I feel less hurried. I can spend hours focusing on some activity without needing a break to check Twitter. I set my own agenda, according to my own interests, as opposed to my Twitter feed setting my agenda, according to the interests of my following.

Perhaps it’s because I’m not a developer and I haven’t had to use Twitter also as a means to promote a product (though I’m a writer, I’ve published some fiction, and I should promote it more), but my experience as a daily active user has always been and continues to be quite different. Again, perhaps it’s due to some habits I have developed early as a Twitter user, but I’ve never felt Twitter as a negative force that messed up my day-to-day schedule.

The first thing I learnt back when I noticed I was starting to follow a bit too many people, is Forget about keeping up with your feed/timeline. When you manage to do that, the rest is easy. I always check Twitter when I’m ready to give some of my time to it. There’s never been any sort of compulsion. I’ve never been out and about, or working at my desk, and feeling assaulted by a burning desire to know what’s happening on Twitter, what my network of people is talking about right now, etc. For me there has never been the dreaded ‘fear of missing out’ with Twitter. I pop up there when I can, I check my Mentions and reply to people when I can, and if I have some time to spare I’ll engage in a bit of doomscrolling. That’s it. It’s not that I’m lucky — it’s something I naturally adjusted to time ago and I still think anyone can do it if they really want. Especially if you follow and are followed by more people than in my case.

Another bit where I felt my experience and attitude to be drastically different than Johnson’s is where he writes:

I’ve felt that at times — many times! — Twitter brought out the worst in me. I struggled to be “my best self” on Twitter. Admittedly, I struggle to be my best self almost everywhere, but Twitter was the worst situation for that. The incentives on Twitter are perverse: the short character limits, the statistical counts of retweets and likes, the unknown followers and readers, the platform and publicity all conspire to corrupt you, to push you toward superficial tweets that incite the crowd. Twitter is an audience, which means that tweeting is a performance, and tweeters are actors. It’s unnatural. If you could design a system from scratch in order to produce the least friendly, least intelligent, least thoughtful “conversation” in the world, you’d probably come up with something a lot like Twitter.

My approach to Twitter, and the way I present myself on Twitter, are mostly shaped after the previous social environments I used to frequent: Usenet, mailing lists, and LiveJournal. I joined those places at a time when I was younger, less cynical, and fascinated by the ability to get in touch and engage with people from any place on Earth, sharing the same passions, exchanging experiences, discussing books, hobbies, outlooks on life, etc. Therefore my approach has always been to be myself, not some made-up online persona. I’ve always been genuine online, and Usenet in particular taught me how to defend myself and how to develop a thicker skin against trolls and time-wasters. And I’ve always dealt with the consequences of being myself: losing people after misunderstandings or disagreements, but also maintaining very long-time friendships because my being genuine attracted people who wanted to approach the online social space as genuinely. This has built a lot of trust and healthy relationships over time. On Twitter and elsewhere I’m still in contact with people I’ve ‘met’ online more than 20 years ago, and friends I’ve met in real life about 30 years ago.

So, when I joined Twitter in early 2008, and after a couple of false starts needed to better understand Twitter’s vibe and flow (for lack of better terms), the way I started interacting with people on Twitter was no different than the way I’d chosen to interact with people before elsewhere — truthfully and thoughtfully. What I choose to say/respond on Twitter is the same thing I’d say to someone if they were here with me. There is no acting or performance involved. Or premeditation: I’ve always used Twitter organically. I’ve written superficial stuff and bad jokes; I’ve ranted when there was something that upset me; I’ve shared resources, praised other people’s work, supported others, listened to them, kept secrets when told to; in a word, I’ve always tried to be as much transparent as one can nowadays online. And given what I sowed, I’m rather satisfied with what I’ve reaped. (This is the point where you should refer back to my afore-linked piece, Assorted musings on social media, specifically the section titled It’s what you make of it).

While I don’t recognise myself at all when Johnson writes, Twitter is an audience, which means that tweeting is a performance, and tweeters are actors. It’s unnatural, I’ve read others express similar feelings about what Twitter supposedly ‘makes you do’ and the way it reshapes your behaviour. This is fascinating to me — this kind of depersonalisation when dealing with something that, in my view, couldn’t be more personal than Twitter. Like I said in my previous article, I keep hearing people complain about their timeline as if it was some kind of demonic TV set that cannot be turned off and forces them to watch its programmes. And I also hear people talk about Twitter using terms you typically apply to drugs and drug usage. They say Twitter is ‘addictive’, that it works in ways that ‘cloud your judgment’, and so forth. Like alcoholics who blame their worst behaviour on the alcohol. The booze made me do it. These are poor excuses, especially among adults. Who resorted to the booze in the first place? You. Who behaved like a moron on Twitter? You. Don’t blame ‘the timeline’. No one made you behave poorly. It wasn’t the Twitter client what impaired your judgment. And if your last-resort excuse is something like, Well, other people on Twitter do the same shit, then you’re a child and you should go back living with your parents, or consider seeking a therapist, because you need help.

I could go on, but again at this point I would be repeating what I already wrote in my previous article, in the section titled It takes work if you care about your experience. What’s maybe worth reiterating is that I’m aware that Twitter can put you in a foul mood and can be overwhelming especially if you use it as a source to follow what’s happening in the world. The world can often be a shitty place, and even if you do everything you can to shield yourself from learning terrible, horrifying, depressing news, that news may reach you anyway because it gets retweeted and amplified by people you follow.

No one has full control over stuff like this. Sometimes you access your Twitter timeline and there it is, the aggravating episode of racism, sexism, gender violence, hate crime, and so forth. But as I’ve said other times, what you can do is try to contain this issue, especially if you realise it’s having a severe, cumulative impact on your mental health. You can’t expect this ‘Twitter entity’ you’ve depersonalised to fix itself or fix the problem for you. You have enough agency to carry out the first steps to filter or remove what you perceive as toxic. Just as you decide to unfollow that guy whom you thought you had more in common with but then just tweets about sports all the time, you can stop following that other dude whose tweets and retweets are always about politics, crime, and keeps going on about how shitty this world is. You don’t need to be subjected to such onslaught of negative (or moronic, or uninformed, or bigoted) thinking. That’s why people who just complain about how dreadful Twitter is, and yet do nothing about it, not even leaving it for good, and have this demanding attitude expecting someone else to make the place better, do not have my sympathy.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.”

Waiting and seeing

From this little Twitter hill in my little Twitter neighbourhood, I’m keeping an eye on Twitter city, and for the moment what Elon Musk is, does, or whom he enables are all irrelevant details with regard to my experience and my subnetwork of people. Am I minimising the mostly negative impact Musk is having on the platform now? No. But for now I can and will exercise all the control I can to mitigate toxicity if and when it reaches me. And how could it reach me, by the way? I’m wise enough to avoid picking fights with types of people who are way beyond any attempt at recoverability through a calm and rational exchange of views. It’s a waste of time, it won’t do anything good, it would probably end up making me a target of some zealot mob. I don’t need to pick these fights as a way of virtue-signalling. I’m not going to save the world by engaging in verbal guerrilla skirmishes on Twitter.

What would make me decide to leave Twitter or stop being active on it are less philosophical stances and more structural changes to the platform. In other words, I care more about the preservation of the Twitter experience than who owns ‘the building’. If the rules of the game change so dramatically and negatively as to make Twitter work in an unrecognisable fashion compared with the status quo, then I’ll make my decision.

Until then, I’m staying on Twitter — for the people, and for the amazing relationships I’ve developed there over the past 14 years.

You can find me on Mastodon as well

I’m not a ‘Twitter refugee’ on Mastodon. I’ve opened my account there back in 2018, because after App.​Net shut down (the best social network I’ve been in), many of the most loyal members ended up on Mastodon, and I followed suit to avoid losing people on the way. And in fact the instance I’m in — appdot.net — was created by an ex App.​Net member for other ‘App.​Net refugees’. My handle is https://appdot.net/@morrick.

Is Mastodon better than Twitter? I don’t know, honestly. When Twitter was business as usual, Mastodon felt like a quieter spot where I could follow and interact with people who were exclusively on Mastodon after having had enough with other social networks. Now that Twitter is emanating an aura of fear, uncertainty, and doubt, and that dozens of people are trying out Mastodon, the atmosphere there is more buzzy. On the one hand, I’m happy to see people reconnecting through new social paths and detours (hey, I managed to use the title of this piece here); on the other, there’s also more ‘noise’, with people boosting other people’s toots (retweeting other people’s tweets, in Twitter parlance) as a means to make new people known across the fediverse. The result is that, despite I only follow 50+ people on Mastodon, my timeline feels messier and slightly more chaotic than Twitter’s at the moment. Things need to stabilise in a way or another before I can say whether one network is ‘better’ than the other for me personally. They are certainly two different animals (no pun intended), and there’s a lot to like about Mastodon, and for the most part it’s about its structure.

The decentralised nature of Mastodon is the core feature I genuinely love. Not being a centralised network, not being owned by a public company or by a billionaire private citizen, is definitely the healthier option in this day and age where every single person seems to have a different concept of ‘free speech’. From a user experience standpoint, however, Mastodon still feels like a ‘nerd-first’ place, and there’s still a bit more friction for the uninitiated, whereas Twitter is seamless immediacy in comparison. Even an experienced netizen like myself has had his Huh? moment — someone I follow on Twitter said they were definitely relocating to Mastodon, and left a clickable link to their profile. I clicked on it, and was taken to a Mastodon-formatted webpage with the profile of this person. I instinctively clicked on the Follow button; since I wasn’t logged into Mastodon, a Login page appeared. I entered my credentials but were refused. After some unsuccessful attempts, I realised what was going on: I was trying to log into the same Mastodon instance that person was on, which is different from the instance I am on. So I opened my Mastodon client, clicked on Search, pasted the full account address of that person, found them and added them.

Wait, Rick — I hear you say — What’s a Mastodon instance? As you can see, we already have the first bit of friction. Since Mastodon is not a centralised site like Twitter, accounts must be handled by several different servers. That’s also why your Mastodon handle hasn’t got a simple syntax like on Twitter, but something that looks almost like an email address. You’re not just @someone on Mastodon: you’re @someone@somewhere.domain. The ingenious part is that once you open an account on a Mastodon server (and your credentials are only valid on that server) you nevertheless can reach anyone anywhere in the Mastodon federated universe (fediverse) and you can be reached in turn. This also explain why you have Local and Global Timelines.

For a novice, another bit of friction at this point is where to sign up. There’s of course a central point of reference, probably the most populated instance: Mastodon.social, which is the original server operated by the Mastodon non-profit entity. But there are many others. You may know about one by word of mouth; you may be invited to join an instance by other contacts who migrated there; you may search online for places that keep Mastodon lists of instances, such as this one; if you are savvy enough, you can even create your own Mastodon instance on your own server, and you can be the only user in that instance in case you don’t want to open access to other people.

As you can see, this doesn’t feel as simple and immediate as Twitter. Fortunately, the friction with Mastodon comes largely in the preparatory stage. Once you’ve overcome this quite literal barrier to entry, once you have your Mastodon profile and have downloaded a client, the mechanics and experience are rather similar to Twitter. You follow people, you post updates, you can favourite other people’s posts, and/or boost them (like when you retweet something on Twitter). Another advantage of Mastodon’s decentralisation is that moderation happens locally, since every server is operated by volunteers and single users. Instead of having to monitor a single network of millions of users, every instance may have to deal with ‘just’ dozens, hundreds, or thousands of users, depending on the scope established by the instance’s maintainer. Instances seem to have a strong focus on being protective communities, and this is tremendously helpful for marginalised people. If you’re queer, trans, non-binary, you may look for LGBTQ-friendly instances and feel safer there.

Cautiously optimistic

Despite all the devastation hurricane Musk has brought to Twitter in such a short period of time, I’m not entirely convinced that the Twitter cruise ship is sinking. I’m not a Musk fan and I don’t consider him a genius, but I keep thinking he must have some semblance of a plan that doesn’t involve the complete annihilation of his latest, quite costly purchase. I think that what’s currently happening on Twitter is what Musk in his head considers a stress test, a sort of experiment where he’s trying to assess just how much he can prune the tree before the organism starts breaking up. I certainly don’t condone his attitude and methods here, don’t get me wrong; I’m just trying to understand what’s going on while hoping for the best (and begrudgingly preparing for the worst).

Before making grand proclamations about the future of Twitter or rage-quitting the platform, I want to see what’s going to happen. If the ‘Twitter experience’ as we know it is going to survive, I’ll keep staying on Twitter while maintaining my presence on Mastodon and other networks. Otherwise I’ll choose a new home online. As a final note, I don’t like the attitude of those who are very fast at pointing fingers and saying that all Twitter ‘remainers’ are endorsing Musk. If I decide not to leave Twitter isn’t because I’m happy to serve master Musk and contribute to making him richer than he is already. If I stay it will only be for the sake of preserving my current ‘neighbourhood’ and network of people. It goes without saying that if the majority of ‘my people’ decide to leave Twitter en masse one day, I’ll go where they go — ‘Twitter experience’ be damned.

Social paths and detours was first published by Riccardo Mori on Morrick.me on 25 November 2022.