My opinions...
I can't remember any meaningful engagement in MySpace. Just looked it up, it still exists. Supposedly people like music there. I like listening to new music on Spotify. I quit and restart when the ads come on or walk out of the room to do something.
I downloaded Whatsapp to communicate with someone, but I let that go. I don't like FB Messenger. People I don't know try to scam me there. They even warn you about it.
I was so hoping Threads wouldn't show you people you don't follow, without asking, but yes, they do that. Bummer. So people can pay to be pushed into your consciousness. That's my biggest gripe about Twitter, you can block all the people you want, they're going to send you people who pay extra.
Twitter is my most groomed feed, I've blocked so many toxic people it runs pretty clean now. Sometimes people put pictures of the tweet instead of quoting the tweet, to get past blocks.
Supposedly 30 million people signed up for Threads today, and Musk is suing Meta. You can sue anyone for anything, but that doesn't mean the case has merit. Trying things is a kind of slimy way of doing business. Musk's platform lost 50% of it's advertisers because of his genius innovations, which are really stupid. I think he's wrecking it up because the spread of information cramps his grifts. No oligarch is going to leave a well functioning platform alone, it works against them.
Facebook held out the promise of connecting with hold high school friends, and family. It wasn't what I hoped it would be. Now the joke it's for generation X.
Reddit held my interest the most, for the longest. I really like writing and I still practice my wares there. But it too has gone through some drama, squashing third party apps. I tried the app before it stopped working but I didn't experience it as superior to the Reddit one, but it didn't include advertising which you can assume signaled it's death. I don't assume you can take the content without the advertising, that's just not how the world works. That project was doomed.
I'm not into Instagram, but it's a place for photos without the Facebook hassle. Threads is based off Insta.
When I read that Tik Tok was Chinese, I deleted it. I don't want it anyway. YouTube has videos, and I guess Tik Tok is the twitter of YouTube.
I blog a lot on Blogger. Tried other ones but don't like them. I'm sure Google will eventually wreck it. Nothing good lasts.
I've gotten a little into Substack, but I don't want to pay, just like I won't pay for Medium or Wordpress. There's Wordpress.org and Wordpress.com, I can't remember which one I tried.
Tumblr is cool, but I used it to look at beautiful photos of nature in the end, to calm down. I rarely choose to calm down.
So you can shunt off parts of yourself into various parts. Tumblr is a photo blog about my ex and daughter. Tribel is spiritual. Tribel begs too much for money and doesn't work. I can't get a SkyBlue invite. Mastodon is political for me. Twitter is soccer. FB is neglected, Insta when I'm anti-intellectual. I'm Redditing less and less. So along comes Thread and what do I do there? Why not self promotion of my writing. Why the hell not. Everything on the internet has turned into self promotion.
Then I read this really fun article in the New Yorker by Zadie Smith about Dickens. Where does that go? In the slush of Mastodon? Something new to appreciate on Threads? Do I really have to figure out a well defined social media policy? Mastodon is my slush, I can't imagine anyone cares what I post there. I put politics because nobody cares about politics. Threads is new and I'm seeing the same old posts about Chris Farley standing with his father. A new platform maybe, but there's nothing really to say. It's what's going on maybe, but there's a make work aspect to it, I've spent hours blocking people on Twitter. It's like insurance in the USA, we could cut away millions of dollars by having socialized medicine, but we prefer these leeches sucking off all this money. Social media is an attention leech, pretending to purvey information. It's addictive and unrewarding. Yet I can't stop...
Links:
Polygon: Twitter clones, ranked: Who’s worth the commitment?
"Every few weeks, I still post on BeReal, but at this point my phone has become a graveyard for abandoned social media apps. Remember Hive? What about Clubhouse, Peach.cool, Pillowfort, and Ello?"
Twitter is burning, Bluesky is smug. Where is the best place to do your pathetic doomscrolling? Guardian
Updates:
4/7: I have 2 Mastodon accounts, because I couldn't figure out how to get my password to my phone app. Now joining Lemmy going through the same problem, but I don't want two accounts. It wants a server for the phone version, and I can't find a server in my profile online, and the ones I guessed didn't work. Deleted my desktop account, and started with Memmy on phone, and created an account, and now I can't sign in on the desktop one. Frustrating.
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