/blog

You know when there's so much frost it almost looks like snow? yeah, well, that.

Although it seems where I am will miss out on any actual snow this week so the frost will have to do.

It's typical, and perhaps telling, that my joining a social network has been an experience more in terms of a technical challenge than a social endeavour.

I didn't enjoy Twitter for a long time before I stopped using it in 2016. I was never a Facebook person and Google+ (my past favourite) changed significantly during the start of 2015 leading me to abandon it and delete my account.

Being burned by these public online spaces made me not want to join another. It's a shame as I really enjoyed the early days of Twitter after joining at the end of 2006. While there had been other social spaces, Twitter felt different – like a new wild west where people were exploring something for the first time and blazing trails. The sense of community back then was extraordinary, likely because it hadn't yet scaled.

Google+ also had a fantastic community feel for the first few years, again likely because it wasn't huge compared to the likes of Facebook, but happy users did make Google any money and they shifted emphasis while ultimately lead to its demise.

I've written before about the shit-show that was 2016. You were told you were following the wrong people but, suddenly, just about everyone became the wrong people. Social was no longer about having fun, it was a place for outrage and division.

And things only got worse.

Do I really want to be part of all that again? Absolutely not, but I'm relying on a different approach to provide a different outcome. That is where treating social as a technical challenge comes from.

The big issue with social since the early years is the loss of community due to the rise in scale, there is no way you can maintain the same sense of 'place' when that place has expanded to encompass multiple millions. I've deliberately started slow, so far only following 14 people. Yes, it means my feed is slow but that's a good thing – it reminds me of those early days when you interacted with the full public feed but could still keep up. Conversation may have been in 140 character snippets but you had time to consider your responses, not everything was a knee jerk reaction. In that respect it felt similar to blogging but on a much smaller scale.

I think this is also why the blogging pen pals idea appeals to me so much, it is the ultimate reduction in scale and email gives us the best opportunity to gather our thoughts before reacting.

A lot has been said about the move of conversation from the public sphere to smaller, usually private, groups. This can only be because people are trying to reclaim community, finding their people and sticking with them rather than trying to take on the world. Small equals focused.

It used to be said that there wasn't too much information just not good enough filters – it's a bit of both. Bluesky, along with other networks, seem to recognise this and have a lot more scope for controlling your feed. Once advertising becomes the main source of income it is no longer in a company's interests to allow aggressive filtering. They want you to see everything, they want you to get angry and outraged, they want you to react and spawn further engagement.

Of course, a decentralised network reduces the reliance on single companies but people naturally gravitate to larger instances with more users which recentralises conversation, costs and control.

Maybe we should give up on the idea of creating another global town square. Communities can still be global in reach but probably not in scale, we should focus on re-establishing smaller, more manageable destinations. Maybe we should instead just reclaim 'niche' – I'm sure we'd all feel a lot better.