Social Network

Before Whatsapp was bought by Facebook it was a great platform for people to chat with family and friends. When Facebook bought Whatsapp, many people, including myself, migrated towards Signal to avoid remaining in the Facebook sphere of influence. Social groups, and their luddites remained on Whatsapp, so we had to revert to using Facebook owned Whatsapp.

GoSocial takes this a step further. GoSocial is a community that has a facebook page that no one can chat on, and GoSocial town groups that no one can write within. In order to write anything you need to find an activity of interest, join the chat, and then you can do the car dance.

At the moment I feel myself drifting away from Facebook because although I like seeing the hikes that people share and the potential groups I could join I do not like the leadership of that site. I also muted the two whatsapp groups that I follow from GoSocial because I want to go back to not using Whatsapp again, because it also belongs to Facebook. Finally although I liked the Threads community I feel myself drifting from that too, because I’m tired of seeing so much junk in my timeline. And now we get to the positive.

I have spent the last day or two playing with Bluesky and I believe that it has potential, At it’s base it’s like Mastodon, but with less anarchic user base, and fewer trolls. This could be because I haven’t spent weeks using it yet.

Threads has a good community and good community tools but it’s part of the Facebook empire and within a few weeks adverts will appear and that will drastically feel the look and feel of the social network.

Recently I reverted to Facebook due to the death of Twitter, but also because of the political bias I see on Mastodon instances. That political bias has encouraged me to take a break from that social network until the conflict is over.

Critical Mass

Yesterday I saw that two people on Facebook discussed leaving Facebook just at the time when I am returning. I am returning for two reasons. The first is that with three billion people you’re more likely to find people who think like you do. It’s also about being local. I can spend thousands of hours on Mastodon, looking for conversations, and people, only to learn that they live thousands of kilometres away, and that they don’t want to meet in person anyway. It’s not that I want to meet in person, but that I like for the option to exist.

Mastodon has reached eight million accounts today. That’s close to the population of Switzerland and two million less than London. Mastodon is growing because it was ready to scale up at the right time. As Musk and Twitter shift towards the Right, and as Musk perpetuates conspiracy theories, on a daily basis, so he prepares the idea conditions for other social networks and opportunities to thrive.

As Twitter loses users, and engagement so other social networks are more likely to thrive. Every day I check on Twitter, and every day I am repulsed by what he is sharing. Every day I feel that I should abandon Twitter. I don’t, for now, for a simple reason. On twitter there are conversations to be had twenty four hours a day, whereas on Mastodon, you have to wait for people to show up. That wait is a good reason to do other things, like return to Twitter.

“The pathology of social media is all about loneliness” Social media professionals take the weekend off. Twitter users use hashtags so that their content can be found without being followed. Everything is turned towards discoverability rather than commitment and conversation. Social media practitioners know that people aren’t listening attentively so they repeat and repeat in the hope of a click or two. Hashtags are just a way of pretending that a conversation has had an audience. It doesn’t measure the number of comments and responses. It doesn’t measure how long threads lasted before they stopped. There was a time when people like me would read every tweet from people we followed and we would converse daily. It created a lot of friendships and led to a lot of face to face meetings. In today’s social media landscape I do see loneliness rather than socialising. I see on twitter that people are actively posting only once or twice a day. On Facebook I have seen such a serious decline in participation that there is little reason to stick around. My generation were active in social media for a short amount of time and now they have retreated to “normal” life. Whilst some people have hundreds of likes on their instagram images I have half a dozen to a dozen. Almost every like on Instagram is a person that I have conversed with online for years. There is a chance that I can tell you how long we’ve been chatting online, whether we’ve met in person and at what event and which networks we have shared. Twitter friends were trusted enough to become facebook friends. Facebook and twitter friends followed on instagram etc. Facebook was a very active and social place when we were all at university and having the same social life. Twitter was a very social network when I was looking for work and meeting the London Social Media crowd, the French social media crowd and the Swiss social media individuals. Ingress has presented me with a large group of Swiss people whom I have met many times recently as an active player of Ingress. Many of them are around my age.  We use Google hangouts to talk and plan missions and are in constant communication. Glocals was good for finding people to explore new activities and locations with but the connection lasted only as long as the activities. There was little to no follow up socialising online. The Glocals Scuba diving group is the one I got along with best and the group with which I did the most activities. It’s a shame that this was an activity for people a decade older than me. When I think of the social journey both online and offline I see that loneliness is not the pathology of social media. I joined Twitter because I love to try new things. Facebook was a network of university friends whom I saw every day. Seesmic was a network of people whom I developed strong friendships with that last to this day and Glocals was probably the only network I joined out of solitude and a need to do things on weekends. I like the irony that the network I joined to avoid solitude is the one that resulted in the deepest feeling of it. Eventually every social network becomes lonely but we would say the same about the city from which our friends have gone, of the bars and more. Geneva is referred to as an airport hub. People come to the city for a year or two and then leave. As a result the refreshing of friendships is very high and it takes a certain personality to cope. Modern transportation; planes, cars, and trains create a pathology of loneliness and social media are part of the solution for as long as the social networks are frequented.

Facebook engagement has declined since farmville distracted people away from conversations and towards mindless interactions with games, the sharing of tabloid content and emotional posts. These changes have had an adverse effect on social networks and the way in which we engage with people. I have noted a shift away from individuals towards following “celebrities” and “thought leaders”. Rather than interacting with 300 people on your timeline, becoming engaged and getting to know people well we have moved to a “yelling to be noticed” model. I have many thoughts on this topic and will elaborate later. Have you thought about how Ello, App.net and other social networks are trying to do what so many forums and discussion forums did before? They’re demonstrating how much context they are lacking. Instead of investing more time with social networks that may never gain traction I’m returning to this blog/website.

Lewis - Jan 5, 2008

Would love to see how filling your social life with London network events would go.

There are now two million people who consider themselves to be part of the London network. It is currently the biggest network Facebook has to the best of my knowledge. I know it was the largest before and there’s a good chance it has remained so. That’s a lot of people. There are 117 events occuring just for today. There are almost a quarter of a million post on the group wall and the top three posted items are Clarkson’s story about bank pranks, Israeli girls and a crash on the m40. Now what would encourage so many people to join this facebook network. Are they all immigrants or students, are they people who have friends in this city so they decided to become part of the network. What does it mean from a social point of view? As i’ve mentioned there are 117 events for today, 165 for tomorrow, 161 the day after and so on. Does this mean that as a person London living in London I could get everything I want and need socially via what the London network is telling me is going on? Would I be able to fill an entire day with activities via this network? It could be interesting to try it and see what happens. Are you part of the London network? 116 of my friends are listed as such. How about you and your friends?

Social networking websites should never be down because their success comes from three factors; ease of use, accessibility, and reliability. With a good layout and good interaction, the website attracts the novice as well as the weather-beaten web surfer that’s seen it all. Accessibility is about it being easy to use on all browsers, whether mobile phones, laptops, or desktops. The third one is the key.

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