Twitter was my favorite social media site. It was a great way to stay up-to-date on just about anything. I could get news of all sorts there from big headline news to news for my relatively niche hobbies. I never really used it to interact with friends and family (that was what I used Facebook and Instagram for), but it had been my most used of social sites for years by a wide margin.
It wasn’t perfect though, There were lots of trolls on the site who would pounce on you when you said something they wanted to be controversial like “bigotry is bad”. It also offered some of the best tools to moderate your own timeline though. It was easy to block people. There were tools to block everyone who liked a particularly asinine tweet.
When Elon Musk bought the site with the clear intention of making it more friendly towards its trolls, I deleted my account.
I first made an Instagram account for testing when I was working on Windows Phone. It ended up being a great app. I could open it up and see photos from my friends. I even made a second account to have a public one to post miniature photos too, and a third for sharing my collection of LEGO minifigures.
During the summer of 2023, the fact that I would open up the app and only see photos and video clips from people I didn’t follow and had no interest in ever following rather than the photos I wanted to see from friends and family wore me out. I haven’t posted anything to my personal account since then.
Facebook has been a background social network for me. When I first started using it, I friended friends from school and family members and got a pretty good timeline to stay up-to-date on all those people. Over time, it too has morphed away from feeling like a place where I see things from my friends into one where Facebook shows me a random assortment of pages, communities I’m not part of, and ads. Pictures I posted to Instagram got cross-posted to Facebook for folks there to see, but like I said, I haven’t posted personal pictures in about a year and a half now. I have shared some news stories I’ve found interesting, but like other social networks, I’m pretty sure Facebook tries to minimize how many people see posts that are links to outside sites.
With Mark Zuckerberg and Meta going all-in on accommodating the far right, I think the end of my accounts on Facebook and Instagram is quickly approaching.
I’m not going to disappear though. I enjoy sharing things on the internet and seeing what others share. It’s just that the tools we’ve all been using for that are no longer doing a good job of it. Luckily, there are alternatives.
Mastodon, an open-source, federated alternative to Twitter, has done an okay job filling my Twitter-shaped hole. It doesn’t have anywhere near the user base that Twitter once did, but it has enough people in areas I care about that I’ve got a useful timeline to follow for politics, tech news, and tabletop gaming discussions. If you’re on Mastodon, you can find me at @scottboehmer@mastodon.online.
I’ve tried a shared album on Google Photos as a replacement for sharing photos with friends and family, but that hasn’t been working out as well. I haven’t been particularly good about advertising its existence, and not many of my family members seem interested in using the service. I’ve been meaning to look around more for a better alternative. For public sharing of things like pictures of my painted miniatures, I’m looking into Pixelfed, but I have yet to find something that looks like a good solution for more personal photos. If you have a photo sharing service that you like using, please let me know.
Then I have my own websites for sharing things. This site is where I’ll be sharing articles and videos that I find interesting – the sort of things I might have once retweeted or posted to my Facebook page. Then I’ve had my gaming blog for years now, and that won’t be going anywhere. Both sites have RSS feeds and e-mail subscriptions to make them easy to follow. I also pay for hosting plans that allow both sites to not have any ads.
For following other people, I’ve been prioritizing RSS and email subscriptions depending on what’s available. I’ve even set up an email account to use just for newsletter subscriptions so that I can keep them separate from my primary inbox. For following RSS feeds, I’ve been using Feedly for years, but I’m not particularly happy with their more recent embrace of AI. It’s another place where I have a todo list item to see if I can find a better alternative.
I’d love to have the web feel like it’s easy to follow and share with all the people I care about in one convenient place again, but with the anti-human incentives of targeted digital ads, I feel that experience is now a thing of the past.
Scott Boehmer 