I will never again devote my energies to building up an audience on a platform whose management can sever my relationship to that audience at will
I don’t know who this person is, but that seems a bit pompous.
He’s a c-list celebrity and genre author. I generally agree with what he says and enjoy his writing, but I’d be surprised if any of his usual audience joined a platform specifically because of him.
Edit: I am surprised that some of his usual audience joined a platform specifically because of him.
I am surprised that some of his usual audience joined a platform specifically because of him.
You’re surprised that a privacy and security advocate and essayist with a large online following would have people who would take his advice on which social media platform is best for security and privacy?
Is that was he is claiming though? I read it as spending effort to get people to follow him there, i.e. posting and engaging on the platform to increase his visibility and number of followers there, when he could spend that effort doing it elsewhere / doing something else.
It’s pretty much the same thing as using services that you can’t self-host and fork. I won’t spend time on any technology that I’m locked into using their app or a login. Is that pompous? I’ve used various services and technology that are proprietary, and invariably it’s bit me in the ass because they have a captive audience.
I will never use a smarthome device that has to have a cloud account or would be bricked without an internet connection, because eventually it will be a brick because the profit incentive says brick it and get the marks to buy another one. That’s the point of that comment.
He is. And his care for the audience translates to posting 10+ post threads to mastodon, a microblogging platform, because he cares so much. Instead of, dare i say, posting one toot with a link to his blog.
I’m puzzles as to why anyone would routinely post threads to Mastodon rather than moving to an instance without a short limit.
Don’t know which is worse, really. At least some at least unlist from the second post onwards, kinda mitigates.
As always, there is a relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/345/
All hail NOSTR protocol 🫡
I totally get where Cory is coming from on this. He’s been around long enough to have actually seen these things happen, from a perspective that’s effectively unique. I believe him when he talks about this stuff. I get his point of not putting effort into building up a platform that can hold him and his audience hostage.
but here’s the good part.
People bailing on Twitter to join Bluesky is reasonably easy (there are tools available to find your friends on the new system). If it’s easy to bail on Twitter to join Bluesky, it will be similarly easy to bail on Bluesky to join Mastodon, if/when that becomes necessary.
There’s a quote from Eric S. Raymond about the issue of getting people to switch to something better (in this case the OS Plan 9) if there’s already something that’s fulfilling the need just enough that it becomes difficult to get anyone to move.
it looks like Plan 9 failed simply because it fell short of being a compelling enough improvement on Unix to displace its ancestor. Compared to Plan 9, Unix creaks and clanks and has obvious rust spots, but it gets the job done well enough to hold its position. There is a lesson here for ambitious system architects: the most dangerous enemy of a better solution is an existing codebase that is just good enough.
The fear now is that people will just switch to Bluesky until it becomes like Twitter, and it’s not a guarantee that Mastodon will be next in line. It could be another closed service that’s primed to take its place, and thus, the cycle continues.
Yes, because it’s so easy to get people to switch to a different service!
I tried to get my friends to move from Facebook to Diaspora. How many of them did? ZERO. Not even the ones who like to talk about how much they hate Facebook.
Look what it took to peel off users from Twitter! The last straw had to be Elon getting a dictator elected. And even then, it’s only a fraction of users.
The functions I use Facebook for are only valid if it’s full of the majority of mankind.
Dating, and finding cheap used shit to buy in a parking lot.
That’s true for any social network. It’s only useful if a lot of people are using it, but a lot of people won’t use it until it becomes useful. That’s the catch-22 that keeps new social networks from getting off the ground.
That’s true from our perspective, but not from someone like Cory’s.
The trap he writes about being stuck on these platforms is because he doesn’t just have friends and people he follows on these platforms — he has an audience. And closing his Twitter or Facebook or whatever would mean leaving large audiences that he has built up behind.
Cory stays on those platforms as his own version of the (justifiable, but regretful) compromise he writes about companies making. Better to stay on those shitty platforms and continue to reach people than abandon both the shitty platforms and his audiences there.
That’s why he doesn’t want to put effort into building an audience somewhere that might force him into the same compromise again.
Cool. Look at that. It’s the daily Bluesky post. Is it my turn tomorrow?
The concerns are true but if people leave Twitter for Bluesky it’s still an improvement because Elon uses the algorithm to boost far-right content and he has your data.
