Creating A Different Kind Of Personal Social Media Experience
TL;DR: - Timeline-oriented score-keeping social media inherently optimizes for performative behaviour on all sides. Attempting to personally police the Internet is stupid. Control your own platform, filter heavily, mute liberally and block whole sections of your platform of choice for the best personal experience.
I've always struggled with social media. Commercial platforms are like dopamine-based video poker machines. This post has sat in my queue for a while and after several rewrites Emily Gorcenski wrote more than I have to say, and better. I mostly (but not fully) agree with her, but particularly her points on Twitter and Mastodon behaviours. That said:
People literally turned hate into profit, and the Twittersphere gleefully took part. The worst of this was how it turned us all into mean girls, everyone vying for the perfect, incisive burn.
Some of those "People" are responsible for Bluesky. I think Emily misses how much of Twitter's "hellsite" moniker are a result of deliberate design. This is in part misaligned incentives between VC funded tech firms and users, but also because once conditioned towards those incentives, techbros will engage in all kinds of obviously shitty behaviour even without them.
When Brendan Eich founded Brave after being booted out of Mozilla for funding political campaigns acting against his own reports, he promised a privacy first browsing experience. I never knew how important to privacy injecting crypto exchange referral codes really was until Brave got caught doing it. Turns out raging homophobia is just an optional part of techbro douchebaggery. The clues were there at Netscape.
Social signaling is an inherent part of social interaction. Timeline-oriented social media hyper-optimizes for it, conditioning users towards it. People collectively internalized the techbro phallusy that a social platform's success (and thus ours within it) comes from falsifiable metrics instead of interaction quality. It's the quality of interactions make a social network good, not whether fakeable numbers are going up.
Today I'm only present on the fediverse, and even then my presence is highly cultivated. I run my own instance which is a double-edged sword. On the one hand it's liberating to have full control of my presence on a social media platform. On the other hand having to periodically wade through moderation chats is often draining.
Some people will tell you blocking certain terms is morally wrong or that requesting (not demanding) a CW is morally wrong. The thing to remember is that the power these people have over you derives exclusively from any power you give them.
Your attention is literally the most valuable thing you have on the Internet. You own it and have agency to curate it as you see fit.
Thankfully most fediverse tools have amazing filtering, blocking and muting tools.
Taking Control Of My Feed
There are two main tools I use to control my feed: Filters and notification settings. Honestly, the combo is great.
Filtering
We all have things we don't need/want to see. I don't need to see anything about the US. I'm not a US citizen. I don't live in the US. Nothing I do will have any significant impact on anything in the US. So I filter uspol, election-based words and various US-specific terms. I filter politics from other countries too including the UK. Some slides through and that's fine. I don't mind the odd post, it's just the floods I struggle with.
I also filter keywords common in commercial and self-promotion posts. I prefer my feed as a capitalism-free space. I filter self promo terms like "pls boost" and "share this" because they're often used for posts I don't need in my feed at the cost of the occasional mutual aid post. I'm limited to how much mutual aid I can provide, but I do what I can when I have cash available. I have an alt on another instance I can use to search for mutual aid posts when spare cash comes in.
I don't know if it's just my corner of the fediverse but I have a lot of mutuals who are best described as occasionally horny on main? Most will CW their lewd posts, but occasionally one slips in (fnarr-fnarr), usually reposts from others who didn't CW. Because of this I have a filter for keywords like lewd, dick etc. As this is a dick filter I added words like elon, musk, trump, andrew tate etc.
There are other terms that don't quite fit in. Sometimes they're high noise1. Sometimes my mutuals are interested in tech I'm not 2. Sometimes they come with posts or responses that I lack the spoons to process.
Muting is a superpower. I nod sagely to Corey Doctorow's writings but his threads are usually broken by my instance moderation. As such I mute his account and read his words elsewhere.
Temporary muting is also great for blocking other peoples' anger when I lack the spoons to process it. It helps me avoid being a reply-guy too. I rarely use account blocks as people can always read my posts via RSS. Instance blocks I very much use. Silencing Mastodon.social is great for my sanity while giving my instance's other users access.
Following liberally, filtering generously and muting have massively improved my fediverse experience. I highly recommend it.
Notifications
A while back I changed my notification settings to no longer see favourites, boosts and new posts on desktops. I can see them on my phone but my Tusky setup doesn't have notifications. Not having these notifications breaks the dopamine feedback loop associated with keeping score.
I used to have a moderate-sized following on Mastodon but lost many to a database query. This was liberating. I no longer had large amounts of likes or replies to posts from people I didn't know. My reach had shrunk to a level where I no longer felt pressure to post or experienced negative interactions when I did.
A few months ago I pruned inactive followers and found it cathartic. It didn't change anything for me but felt like letting go of attachments to past connections.
Prioritizing Mutuals
About a month ago I thought I'd try to prune my following list. It turned out a lot of people I responded to didn't follow me at all, and I don't really like being a reply guy. Amazingly, the signal to noise ratio shot up through the roof. I also feel my interactions with mutuals have made for a cozier experience. I still have accounts I follow that don't follow back, most notably useful bots.
Other Features Of Note
A long time ago I switched from open follows to follow requests. I make my follow requirements pretty clear on my profile, and if someone submits a request I expect them to have read and to honour those requirements. I'm not hard and fast about it but I treat it like Van Halen's brown M&M's rider. If someone doesn't comply with the requirement they probably haven't read it. If they have they've consciously chosen to ignore it.
The second feature I found was automatic post deletion. Every now and again I get a flurry of follow requests. Sometimes this is because I posted something about a subject that people were interested in discussing, but often this is a pithy sarcastic comment or meme that just chimed with people. Automatic post deletion places an upper limit on organic post reach. Like Emily, I archived my twitter posts before leaving, but unlike Emily I never curated them. It turns out I find social media ephemeral, and that's how I like it.
I genuinely do not need to know the latest takes from Russia's number one SharePoint admin, fluff pieces about how X is challenging Y or "changing Z forever", or which embassy walls Julian Assange dirty sanchez'd.↩
Quite a lot of people I interact with occasionally get excited for a few days about technologies like UXN, CollapseOS and so on. I'm more interested in reusing the tech we have than building new tech so I'll probably never get round to using them. Nothing against the people involved, new releases sometimes dominate my feed for days at a time.↩