Do you feel lucky, social media punk?

For those tired of waiting for the new social media killer app

Summary of the social media landscape in no uncertain terms:

1. BlueSky and Threads look like placeholders, they are not implementing features or providing sufficient compute resources until they are sure that Twitter is dead. Both of them will have to provide support for the Activity Pub W3C protocol (that was created by the Mastodon guru) and will eventually be supported by all social media platforms (including twitter).

2. Twitter dumpster fire: The election troll activity and the new Twitter CEO will determine what happens here over the next few months. If you are there, keep blocking the crazies, the trolls and morons and preserve your mental health (as I do). I will not fault you if you give Elon your hard earned dollars for a blue check, but you will have more fun if you use them for something else, e.g. I used them for a Git-hub copilot subscription to automate writing glue stuff for that vomitus of programming language Python). Or you can give your cash to pornhub: afterall, #UDoU with your money.

3. Unknown X: Frankly , there is room for a new platform that does not come with the luggage of Elon, Zuckerberg or Jack to emerge. What will it look like? You can tune out the techno-geek stuff and stop reading now. Or you can keep reading: after all, I don’t run a nuanced publication that charges you to read my brain farts.

   1. ActivityPub is here to stay and the Mastodon community has created the tools to get a service started, so it will be idiotic NOT to base this on Mastodon.

   2. It will require authoring a recommender system layer *over* the typical Mastodon server setup and may use some form of AI (neural nets despite being hype shit , are ok for this purpose) to learn individual preferences from interactions with a chronological timeline. So the algorithm will evolve with your interests, tracking those and ingesting some ads and random stuff from the chronological timeline to not pigeon hole you.

   3. I have no idea which revenue generation model should be applied to create a viable business. There are significant regulatory considerations (especially if the site is to cater to citizens of the European Union) before one can monetize a free service (in fact this is the reason Threads is not available in the EU). There are also moderation considerations and expenses.

   4. I hope that the nukler block (block entire accounts, their followers and the followers of their followers) is a feature of “X”, as it will save me from thumb injury.

So what should the social media punk do?

1. Diversify your presence by creating accounts to all media platforms & reconnect with your friends from elsewhere

2. Don’t reward Jack or Zuckerberg with many posts: BluSky and Threads both suck. In my book, there are just predators circling over Twitter’s festering wounds (which is fine), but the reason I advise against voluminous content there is the fact that they are cheap and opportunistic. In other words, the product sucks.

3. I will mostly be posting on my main twitter account and my 3 mastodon accounts (less frequently - the chronological timeline does not agree with me), until product X emerges. But not money to Elon boy - he is not worth my hard earned dollars.