I have been online since 1993, with my first website in 1996, blog and wiki in 2002, Twitter in 2006, etc. Twitter started getting really bad around 2015, to the point that in 2018 I created an account in mastodon.social which, after a couple of moves, ended up in my current account in mastodon.nz.
Part of my Twitter network stayed there, part moved to Mastodon—where I also connected with new people, part moved to LinkedIn—where I started from scratch a year ago—and the biggest part moved to BlueSky during last year.
One can learn several things from this fragmentation:
- Having a single failure point, THE social media site, is a risky proposition.
- Descentralised sites are more resilient to takeover, but much harder to explain to the average user, which tends to explain their slow growth.
- There is no reasoning with bots and bored ghouls: block early and often; the alternative is to be overrun by them.
And that’s why I sometimes remove comments and, if the commenter is too eager and desperate, I block them. Run out of patience ten years ago.
