Ive been thinking about the role of social media in my, and other peoples, lives lately.
The Situation
I feel there is a social media shaped hole in my life. Yes, I spend a fair bit of time on social media, but it’s the wrong social media, it is not fulfilling my needs. I spend all this time online ostensibly engaging with people, while I am also constantly losing touch with friends and family because we forget to DM each other for a few months and don’t even realise how much we have fallen out of each others lives until we talk again and find there’s a lot of catch up to do.
There is/has been no social media that can fill this hole. I take issue with every single platform I have ever used, for these reasons:
Issue 1: No middle ground
Out of the thoughts and conversations a structure has emerged for thinking about it. There’s a spectrum of social media.
One one side is your “chatting with friends” social media, messaging apps like signal and WhatsApp, where you talk to a small and curated group of people directly.
On the other side is “screaming into the void” social media. You may not know anyone personally on these social media, you publish your posts to the whole world, a public broadcast, maybe you hear something back. Maybe you try to build a following and become one of millions of micro-influencers. TikTok, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr all sit here.
I have been searching for a nice middle ground social media. With the previous names in mind, i like to call this the “screaming into a room full of friends” social media. For some, Facebook fills or has filled this role, and maybe Snapchat works for this as well, but I never got along with it. Also Discord. None of these quite work for me though. I don’t want to scream into the void, but when I just use DMs and group chats, i lose touch with anyone who I am not actively messaging all the time. I find the platforms I mentioned about teeter around on either side of the right balance. Some feel like im chatting in a room that’s a little too exclusive, so I don’t keep in touch with all my friends, sometimes it feels like I am screaming into the void and my friends happen to be there too. This is not what I want.
Issue 2: I want to be where the people are
A middle ground social media is only good if people I know are on it. If I talk about my life on social media and no one sees it, I may as well just write a diary. The point of making the social media post is that the post leads to socialising, leads to maintaining relationships I care about.
Facebook used to work because most people were active on there, but it doesn’t work any more because a large chunk of the people I care about refuse to use it. I refuse to use it also. It’s a nasty website.
Instagram works if I am only trying to keep in touch with people my age, but my elders are mostly not on there.
Discord is a little to exclusive or inclusive, depending on what server I am on. The only way to have it work for this purpose for me would be to have a server that everyone I like and no one I don’t like all joins. But that obviously wouldn’t suit all those people. Impossible.
issue 3: Eww Capitalism
I hate adverts.
I think we all hate adverts, truly. For me personally I know they have a measurable negative impact on my wellbeing. I have mostly cleared adverts out of my life now and I am feeling so much lighter. I don’t want to use any social media that is going to break my peace. No adverts, no sponsorships, no influencers. I use Pipepipe to watch youtube on my phone, I use Freetube to watch it on my computer, I use Sponsorblock to skip all the sponsor segments. All other social media I use exclusively through Firefox with ublock origin. Life is beautiful now.
Most social media platforms are run like businesses. Well, they generally are businesses. They are harvesting profit one way or another. This runs counter to my goals. From a profit perspective, the more I use a social media the better, as they get more data from me to sell, and more watch time on their ads and whatever else. From a wellbeing perspective, the less I use social media the better, down to a point where all it is is a little tool in my life to help maintain social bonds I care about. Any time I am on social media, if I am not maintaining social bonds I care about, I am wasting my precious time.
All the mainstream social media are also competing businesses, which means they refuse to cooperate with each other. A large part of my quest here is that I want to make one post and have it be seen by all the people I like. With Facebook, Tumblr, X, Whatsapp, etc, I would have to make several posts which is tedious. And I would feel weird about it, people might be like “hey, your crochet project is cool and all, but why did you post about it on Instagram, tumblr, discord, and 5 separate group chats? Isn’t that a bit much?” And I’d have to agree, I think that is a bit much.
I do not trust any social media that is owned by a business. Basically because exactly what happened to X could happen to any of them. I do not like my space being under the control of The Higher Ups. I want social media to be controlled by the people who use it.
On this note also, some of the ways Facebook is used are kind of terrifying to me. Many towns and villages have Facebook groups. They function as online community notice boards. If you want to be involved in your community, you may need to have a Facebook account. It doesn’t matter if you have concerns about storing your data with a company based in facist America, it doesn’t matter if you would rather be off social media for your mental health. Not having Facebook = Social isolation. I’ve even heard of Facebook groups being used for things like flooding alerts. This is really important information that should not be being broadcast only though a privately owned data harvesting company. Feasibly, local governments could host their own online notice boards, entirely owned by them, not any third party. This would be a more comfortable state of affairs.
What do I want?
- I make one post in one place, and it can be seen by everyone I want to see it.
- The ability to restrict who can see a post, so that it doesn’t feel like I am always addressing The Entire World
- I don’t want to worry about my posts being taken out of context by people who don’t know me
- I don’t want to worry about whether my posts are worth the time of people who don’t already care about me
- A home feed that shows me things I am subscribed to in newest-post-first order. No algorithm crap. Just the most recent stuff that my friends and family (and maybe creatives and thinkers i am interested in) are up to.
What am I trying?
Mastodon. It ticks a lot of boxes for me.
Here’s a pretty nice accessible explainer of what Mastodon is:
Why I like it:
- No big company owns it
- Mastodon runs on Free Open Source Software. Anyone (who is sufficiently adept with tech) can get a server and run Mastodon on it. All the independent servers can connect together to form one big social network.
- The server is owned by someone, but they don’t own the whole network. If they do something I don’t like, I can move my account to a different instance that works how I want it to. In contrast to conventional social media that can suppress queer content, refuse to ban hate speech, mandate ID checks, and ban nudity or “adult content” and ultimately users just have to suck it up.
- Can’t be bought by Nazis. Can’t be bought by billionaires. Can’t be bought by anyone. Open Source, babey!
- I can control who sees my posts.
- My account is set so that by default my posts are only visible to followers, and I only accept people I personally know as followers. Sometimes I make public posts but mostly I am just using it to keep in touch with people I know.
- I do wish Mastodon would allow me to have different types of follower. Similar to Instagram’s “close friends” feature. Sometimes I post art publicly and then people want to follow me, but I don’t know them so I don’t want to give them access to my whole account, which is a shame because I would happily have them follow me just to see my art in their feed.
- My feed is in reverse-chronological order, just how I like it
- Also, with the feature called “lists” I can create multiple feeds, I can have a feed that is just what my friends/family are doing, a feed that is just artists, a feed that is just news, etc. Very nice.
The main downsides are:
- There’s not many people I know there
- There are enough people there that I find it worthwhile posting regularly, but it is still not fulfilling the purpose I set out for, unfortunately.
- The post format is not very flexible
- Mastodon typically has a character limit of 500 and limited options for adding media to posts. You can add up to four images that will appear below the post. You can upload very short videos. If you post a link, it might generate an embed for you. I generally understand why these limitations exist, but I still don’t like them.
- This may not bother people who feel at home on Instagram, X, or Bluesky, but I am a tumblrina at heart, and I like to have lots of words in my posts and lots of control over the layout.
- To fill this gap, I have this website. Here I can do long-form posts and have a lot more creative freedom
Join me?
If you relate to what I am talking about here, maybe you would like to join my experiment?
My account is on cupoftea.social I like it because it is hosted in the UK (where I live) and has a 1000 character limit. you could join me there, or find another instance you want to join. The main instance is mastodon.social. There are site that help you find different instances too like this one. Honestly, I don’t think it makes much difference which instance you use. the network is all connected up anyway.
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