In the Dark

I saw the post attached below and thought I’d share it here. I don’t have as many followers on social media as the author of the post and I’ve never thought of confining this blog to purely research topics. In terms of academic matters I never thought Twitter was useful for anything other than sharing web links. I’m glad that I stuck to the longer form of blogging represented by this site.

Nevertheless I do have similar experiences of Twitter to those described in the article. It has indeed turned to shit. Since Elon Musk took over, you are basically silenced unless you pay for a blue tick, the social media equivalent of buying a megaphone for use in a library. Add the constant stream of promoted tweets and other ads and it really is a bad experience all round. I locked my Twitter account some time ago.

While I still post on Twitter, I now much prefer Mastodon. I have about 1/8 the number followers there, but much higher levels of engagement and it’s far more civilized. WordPress has now introduced an autopost to Mastodon, incidentally. The autopost to Twitter is no longer supported. If anyone wants to follow me on social media I’d recommend finding me on Mastodon.

(I’ve also joined BlueSky, but so far that is rather slow. I won’t be joining Threads, as that isn’t available in the civilized world (i.e. the European Union) owing to data protection issues.)

This entry was posted on July 11, 2023 at 1:38 pm and is filed under Biographical with tags BlueSky, Mastodon, social media, Threads, Twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.