No one needs more meta commentary on the social web this week, but here I am with thoughts and a blog so…

  1. My technical and nerdy community fully moved over to Mastodon over the course of the winter and I have a pretty great experience there.
  2. A significant portion of the education policy, social science, urbanism, local news, and general policy advocacy world remains stubbornly on Twitter. I use Twitter far less than I used to, and it’s value has declined significantly, but I still find that scrolling for a few minutes a few times a day surfaces stuff I wanted to see and read.
  3. I have no interest in Bluesky as an also-ran. I have considered snagging an invite just to hold onto my identity and because crossposting from Micro.blog is easy, but I have no reason to believe that it will be worth investing in.
  4. I don’t really get why the folks in (2) find Mastodon hard, despite all of the commentariat constantly talking about how confusing it is. This is the curse of being a technical nerd. But honestly, you just sign up on a webpage or in an app and then everything looks at feels 95% like Twitter.
  5. Threads, so far, is filled with lots of content I don’t want. The combination of the Instagram social graph (mostly people I know, not people I’m interested in, per se), the weird algorithmic feed shoving empty brand and influencer crap in my face, the lack of web app or Mac app and lack of iPad app… it’s clearly very popular, but at least right now it’s like a packed Spring Break party on the beach in Miami— not somewhere I’ve ever wanted to be.
  6. I love having my own blog, on my own domain, pushing stuff out over RSS, and where possible, into other platforms that make it convenient for folk who want to read what I write to find it and me and engage with me.
  7. I am sad that so much of the social internet has closed off the ability to automate posting from outside of their products. Syndication is the solution to widely and natively using everything.