My social media burnout

I feel like I'm burnt out on social media, or at least that part of it comprising microblogging platforms.

It's not just the seemingly endless procession of, "no, it's not here, it's just over the next hill" in which we've gone through everything from discovering Hive were running their entire network on three bits of string and an old Pentium 4 desktop they found in the attic, to deciding Zuckerberg is the new saviour of everything because it's not like there's anything in his previous pattern of behaviour that would suggest otherwise. No, it's what us digital Littlest Hobos are posting during the fleeting moments our chosen platforms intersect.

We know how this began. Twitter under Agrawal started making the most cursory of efforts to tame its enormous far right hate speech problem, so self-professed libertarian Elon Musk bought it and ripped the heart out of it because it turns out understanding social networks is harder than building rolling fireworks which can crash themselves into things.

Twitter is now a shell. Little or no discussion takes place any more. Maybe there's some secret cache of people I'm missing out on, but all I see is endless promo, a wall of, "watch my video", "buy my stuff", and the Metropolitan Police Service's seemingly endless mission to catalogue every last Just Stop Oil protest they attend. That's before we get into the wall of cryptobro and listicle blog advertising, on top of the occasional genuine brand getting fleeced for having their advert shown to the same disinterested person 30 times per day.

Like any terminally online digital native, I had my Fediverse lifeboat ready and so found myself on Mastodon. Which was great. For a fleeting moment, we truly felt like the Old, Weird Internet was back, where people did things because they cared about them and wanted to share them with other souls, and communities funded things themselves rather than inviting the corporates and advertisers.

Note the past tense.

Something weird has happened to my experience of Mastodon. Not only has it been hollowed out by people packing their bindle and heading toward the horizon for elusive dreams of BlueSky or Threads, but the number of people I feel like I'm actually interacting with is tiny. Mastodon for me is becoming increasingly write-only.

Mastodon has always had its meta, particularly between the people who want it to adopt Twitter's tools for finding posts and dunking on them, and those who really don't because they understand how inseparably bound those tools were with Twitter becoming an alt-right hellscape. But lately I've noticed how many posts have become pronouncements, prefaced with "don't dare reply to this" and postfixed with "I am the expert in this domain and will not be challenged".

This is the visible surface of an etiquette iceberg. The discourse is missing. People don't reply back any more. They parsimoniously measure out favourites and boosts, to the point half the meta is now requests that, y'know, it's okay to click that star button, it costs you a mere 0.000005% of your mouse's life expectancy and makes someone happy. We've gotten so defensive about the problem of reply guys we've forgotten to make this a nice place for just... guys.

Worse, if the normal people stop replying that leaves only the people who want to say something inscrutably clever nobody but themselves will ever truly understand, the ones determined to spread their bizarre ideology no matter how inappropriate the context, and of course those driven by an innate need to disagree so they can feel smarter than everyone else. Reply guys love a vacuum, no matter whether it's got a "no reply guys" sign out the front or not. I learnt that from YouTube; the best defence is a solid body of reasoned, pleasant discourse. Well. That and an aggressive no-tedious-bullshit moderation policy.

This is my problem. I have maybe 4 or 5 people I regularly have proper conversations across multiple posts with, a few more where I'm maybe not so interested but I see them doing the same with their followes, and then the rest is all write-only. Even if it's not explicitly a pronouncement they never come back to engage, the replies left as helpless shouts into the void.

It doesn't help that so many of these write-only missives are about how we should behave if we want Mastodon to resemble the online experience of 25 years ago.

We're trying to rebuild the "old Internet", but we've got 500 architects and while everyone can describe in detail who they don't want laying the bricks there are vanishingly few who appear willing to actually lay said bricks themselves. Too many people want to be main characters, the ones who stand atop a hill and shout to a peasantry kept back by fences. The "old Internet" didn't work like that. There were no architects. People just laid bricks and built crude online huts and took the time to email each other even though nobody else would see it and they were spending 10-20 minutes of their time trying only to make one single person across the other side of the world happy.

Now most of us can't even be bothered with a single mouse click, let alone the 45 seconds it takes to write a quick acknowledgement.

All of which doesn't help, because while we don't need any more architects we also don't need archaeologists either, the "old Internet" happened emergently and anything which recreates the same feeling of pleasure and enjoyment will also need to, because a key part of it was that frontier feeling where nobody really knew how to build this thing. You just laid bricks and hoped.

Neither does it help me, because I have one platform of endless promo with the occasional right-wing bad take yeeted into my feed, one platform of pronouncements from people who can't be bothered to help build the things they're pronouncing about, and I don't see enough evidence any of the others are going to be anything but terrible for me in slightly different ways.

Which in tl;dr form is that thing I started with: I'm burnt out on social media. I don't know how to fix it, I don't even know how to fix my bit of it short of mass unfollowing all but the few people I regularly interact with, and I guess all that's left is writing a blog post about how I feel because those are the bricks I know how to lay.

But not like eggs. That would be weird.