Social Media

Erin Kissane has written an insightful post on Bluesky’s closed beta, and more importantly the response from the Mastodon community. In particular, the passage below had me violently nodding in agreement.

The whole article is 🔥 and well worth a read, but this part of the conclusion hits the crux of Musk’s new dillema. The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

Politics, celebrity gossip, business headlines, tech punditry, odd news, and user-generated content. These are the chew toys that have made me sad and tired and cynical. — Merlin Mann, Better

Reader, I did it again. I joined another social network. I know, I know. I should know better, right? But this time feels different. There’s something special about this one. Maybe it’s simply the contrast from Facebook and Twitter that makes it so appealing, but I can’t help but feel there is great promise in Mastodon.

This old post from Anil Dash has been making the rounds again this week, and for good reason. As it turns out, we have a way to prevent gangs of humans from acting like savage packs of animals.

The antidote I’ve found for this is to write for only two people. First, write for yourself, both your present self whose thinking will be clarified by distilling an idea through writing and editing, and your future self who will be able to look back on these words and be reminded of the context in which they were written.

You are not a brand. You are a human being. Writing is your craft. Story is your art. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: who wants to read a story by a brand?

One downside about social media is that it’s easier to get caught up in other people’s drama just from tangential contact. In most cases, it’s just the narcissism of small differences at work, and it isn’t worth your time and energy to get upset about it.

In case you missed it, Pownce announced the release of the second revision of its public API today. The new API is much more elaborate than the previous version (which was honestly kind of a joke), and promises to be robust enough that interested parties could use it to rewrite the Pownce desktop app from scratch without losing any functionality.