In the last few years I’ve been switching away from the more corporate social networks, and trying to move to more open, less commercial ones that have less intrusive algorithms behind them.
I used to use Twitter, but I have such fundamental political disagreements with the people now in charge, that I moved away quite a long time ago.
Luckily, I mostly used Twitter to keep in touch with my professional peers, and a lot of them seem to have the same opinion as me. As a group, we have managed to move over to using Mastodon in sufficient numbers that there is still a coherent network.
In more recent times, I’ve come to the same political conclusions about the people behind Facebook, and so am trying to move away from that too. This is a trickier proposition, since a lot of the people I followed there are friends and family. These people are often less technical, and find Mastodon a bit intimidating. That’s not really fair on Mastodon, as it’s not inherently more complicated than Facebook, but it’s got an image problem, and shifting that with my friends is beyond the scope of things that I can easily achieve.
As a result, I decided to try something else, and I settled on Bluesky. This isn’t an ideal replacement for Facebook, and nor is a totally open, corporate-free platform, but it’s better than many of the alternatives. It also seems to have gained traction amongst many of the political journalists and podcasters that I follow, and so an added bonus of using it was that I could follow those people on Bluesky, and not have their posts muddled up with the technical ones on Mastodon.
In contrast to Facebook and Twitter, the new platforms that I’m using make no decisions about which posts I get to see - they just present them to me in time order.
This is what I want; part of what is wrong with older platforms is how the algorithms are used to steer you in certain directions, distorting your perspective.
However, it does come with an old problem from the earlier days of social media, which is that you can feel a bit overwhelmed with the sheer volume of content.
As the cliche goes, it’s like trying to drink from a firehose.
I’ve adopted a simple approach to this problem, which you might also find helpful.
It’s very obvious, and lots of people are already doing it I expect, but just in case you’ve not tried…
Both Mastodon and Bluesky allow you to build your own lists of users, in addition to the main list of those who you follow.
What I’ve done on both platforms is to create a “Priority” list, add a handful of users to them, and set up my clients to only show me posts from people on the “Priority” list by default.
This simple step massively reduces the overwhelm. Whenever I come into the app, there are a manageable number of posts to catch up with. If I still want more, I can switch the client into the “show me everything” mode, and keep going, but I don’t feel like I’m missing out if I don’t do this.
The people I add to these lists are usually friends or colleagues who’s opinion I am particularly interested in, but they are also people who tend not to post too much. In particular, they usually don’t post too much of other people’s content. I aggressively remove people from the list if too much of what they post is a re-post, or does not fit with my idea of what I’m using each platform for.
This isn’t necessarily a value judgement, and certainly not a judgement on them. I used to worry that people might spot that they are not on my list, or were on it and have been removed, and might somehow feel aggrieved. I’ve got over that worry though. Life is too short. These lists are just practical measures that I use to manage not seeing more posts than I can cope with. I still regularly put the clients into “show me everything” mode, and enjoy getting a wider range of stuff. Sometimes this prompts me to add someone to the priority list. Other times I feel like I’ve got too many posts in “priority” mode, and I remove someone who’s got a bit noisy!
All in all, I feel that this approach is simple, and works. It’s allowed me to get back into a feeling of connection with my profession, and with a few friends1, and that’s great.
Unfortunately I still can’t persuade most people to move off Facebook, which is sad. I do wish that there was something a little better than Bluesky to replace it - particular to replace the community groups side of things. Still, Bluesky is good enough, until something else comes along. ↩