Post-Twitter Services as Covered by the New Yorker ⇥ newyorker.com

Kyle Chayka, of the New Yorker, wrote a pretty good profile of Bluesky and its CEO Jay Graber recently which, as it turns out, is his third in what is now a set of articles about the post-Twitter services trio. On Mastodon in November 2022:

Users who want to have a lively, varied experience on Mastodon have to put in effort, too. On Twitter, you log in to your account and are immediately thrust into the melee of the “global town square,” for better or worse. On Mastodon, you can start accounts on as many servers as you like but you have to log on to each one in turn, as if each were its own separate social network. The server your account is hosted on is embedded in your username (mine is @chaykak@zirk.us) and becomes a kind of home base. Mastodon offers various feed configurations, from a “local” one that shows only posts from accounts on your server to a more bustling admixture of all the users you follow across any server. There’s a tool called Debirdify that can tell you which Twitter users you follow are already on Mastodon. But Mastodon’s built-in friction and fragmentation make it harder to communicate with many people at once. You can peer into servers you don’t belong to, like a curious tourist, but you won’t be able to post to their feeds.

This is a strange interpretation of how Mastodon works. It is technically correct but irrelevant; there is no need for someone to have accounts on multiple servers as they all communicate over the same protocol. You do not need a Gmail account to send a message to a Gmail user, for example. But I think it illustrates the perceived complexity of the service while, unfortunately, doing little to clarify it.

Do not get me wrong — I like Mastodon a lot. It is the post-Twitter service I use most often. But it reminds me a lot of something like Usenet or mailing lists while the others remind me of forums. It has a little more technical overhead and a few more quirks. If you are sent a link to a post on another server, for example, and you want to boost it, you have to go find it from your own server. It remains a clunky process.

Next up, Chayka wrote about Threads in July 2023, shortly after it launched:¹

[…] It is currently impossible to see posts solely from followed accounts; Meta executives promise that a chronological feed is in the works, but, as on Facebook and Instagram, that feature is unlikely to be the default. As a result, much of what I see on Threads is the kind of banal celebrity and brand self-promotion that I tried to avoid on Twitter — posts from Chris Hemsworth and Ellen DeGeneres, Spotify asking fans for their favorite playlists, and suggestions to follow Kardashians. The Threads feed rarely appears in a chronological order and often serves up disparate posts from the same account in a row.

Even though Meta has made many changes to Threads in the interim, it still feels like a pretty hollow place. Jon Passantino, of Status, attributes this “lifeless” feeling to “Meta’s antagonistic relationship with power users” — an “indifference toward those powering the platform”. Perhaps.

I think the problem is simpler: Threads has no character. It feels like the conference room at any three-star chain hotel. It has all the attitude of a corporate retreat and the energy of a midsize rental car. That is simply the vibe Meta brings. No amount of power users can change that.

Finally, on Bluesky. This is the second such article published by the New Yorker about the platform; the first was in May 2023, but that one was shorter and not by Chayka, so it does not fit the theme I am setting. Chayka:

With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as “around thirty-three”) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men. With Trump and Musk in power, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward turn. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has cut back on fact checking, abandoned D.E.I. efforts, and said that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish only pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that subjects users to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wanted to, could just delete the whole X time line — just do these totally arbitrary things,” she said, adding, “I think this self-styled tech-monarch thing is worth questioning. Do we want to live in that world?”

A punk rock attitude is not really compatible with being a corporate executive — only to the detriment of the latter — yet Graber and Mastodon’s Eugen Rochko are the closest I have felt to that spirit. I hope I am not wrong about either of them. I feel like these two platforms can coexist without either one needing to win or become absorbed in the drama of the other. I am a little disappointed to read the two “discussed a collaboration that would have allowed their two protocols to interoperate, but each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol”. I think it is fine to keep them entirely separate, but it makes sense to me for the two to be compatible so long as they retain a spirit of openness and portability.