Antoine-Frédéric
activity timestamp 3 years ago

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", and
  • outcasts, 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.
Antoine-Frédéric
activity timestamp 3 years ago

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.