I've identified 4 kinds of social media users:advertisers,students and mums keeping in touch with (family) friends,entrepreneurs, bloggers, artists, and so on, trying to promote their "brand", andoutcasts, looking for psychotherapeutic listening (deep, non-judgemental)Microblogging was a bad idea not only in its usual "Twitter" user farming-inspired implementations but also because as the concept it is, it intrinsically conflates the last three use cases. However I'd like to suggest as well that social media can be genuinely good because they isolate people in small clusters, and this helps them to keep in touch with their relatives. Of course it's pretty bad for sharing online resources to a large number of people, this is why we've got blogs and Gemini, RSS/atom feeds, and links.
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Ok my bad, microblogging isn't a bad concept. But its current implementations (besides twtxt and bonfire) conflate the last three use cases.Microblogging may be good, actually, but Mastodon and Pleroma keep me hooked as well, make me aggressively look for excuses to get people's attention AFK, etc. (Although I'm reading 1984 and that's enough to get mad.) I believe the difference lies in the intents I put when I write something, i.e. that Pleroma makes me write to get someone else's attention. The UX makes it different here.
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Maybe because attention on Twitter (thus on Mastodon and Pleroma) is deliberately scarce, which makes valuable contents hard to find. A pretty bad microblogging service if you ask me.
I don't know why but I feel like scarcity is interpreted as environmental pressure and for this reason creates extrinsic motivation, as the need to have better relationships with your environment – until the urban and normalized, but pathological point where you're trapped in it.
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