It’s now been over two years since I ditched Twitter, and I recently made the decision to go ahead and outright delete the account rather than leave it there to ward off imposters. It’s been really interesting to explore the new landscape of social media during this time, and I wanted to put together a post with some of my current thoughts.

I’m on Bluesky now, I guess?

First, I set up a Bluesky account a number of weeks ago, and I’ve been following other Bluesky accounts for a while (first via RSS, now via the Reeder app alongside RSS), but I’ve finally started actually using it since the election, which seems to be sparking some new interest in ditching Twitter. I’m especially happy that Mormon Twitter seems to be re-emerging on Bluesky, since that’s one of the things that I’ve missed the most. I also think a lot of Bluesky features (domain name-based handles, starter packs, better trust and safety features) are neat!

Unlike Mastodon, I’m so far keeping a single account rather than different ones dedicated to different contexts, and a surprising amount of both of those decisions is related to religion! I was uncomfortable having my faith transition play out in public, so I didn’t tweet a lot about religion between 2020 and 2022. When I re-evaluated my online presence post-Twitter, I also figured that people interested in my research weren’t necessarily interested in my thoughts on religion (and possibly vice versa), so I split my blog up into subblogs, each of which connected with a different Mastodon account. I don’t have the energy to do the same for Bluesky, and if any one population would be interested in all of my thoughts across all the subblogs, it would be Mormonsky, so I’m fine with that.

In terms of ideals and values, I think that Mastodon remains the superior microblogging platform. That said, it’s also been easier to find a “community” I recognize and like on Bluesky, and that counts for something. In my mind, it’s not dissimilar to the question of operating systems: I’d really like to be Team Linux one day, and I have some harsh criticisms of Apple as a company, but I just don’t see myself pivoting away from iOS/macOS in the near future. Then again, as I’ll write about in the next section, my current approach to social media has room for both Mastodon and Bluesky.

maintaining platform independence

Part of the reason for that, though, is because neither Mastodon nor Bluesky is at the center of my online presence. I think the best social media decision I’ve made in recent years is to make everything an outgrowth of this blog rather than something independent. I don’t mind having a foot in Mastodon and a foot in Bluesky because my posts to both originate on my website and only then (and thanks in large part to the wonderful Micro.blog) are pushed out to Micro.blog, Mastodon, and Bluesky without a lot of effort. I think that POSSE is the ideal form of social media.

That said, I also recognize that being personally and professionally interested in tech has been a huge help here. Even then, getting to where I am now has taken years of tinkering that has sometimes bordered on the ridiculous. There’s still a lot more work to do (I would like better integration with Webmentions, and it would be fantastic to build in ActivityPub compatibility at the site level so that maybe I didn’t strictly need Mastodon after all), but I’m proud of what I’ve managed to set up. I’ve learned a ton about Hugo and content management more generally, and that’s been a huge boost to my teaching; my Markdown fluency has gone up, which is helpful in general, and it’s been personally really gratifying to teach myself how to do all of this.

I also love the feeling of owning all (or at least the vast majority) of my social media content. All of my posts exist in Markdown files synced to my computers and phone. My posting routines always involve dropping the content off in Day One, my journaling app, because why not? Even if the Fediverse peters out and even if Bluesky gets bought up by tech bros, my posts are my posts are my posts.

revisiting Mastodon

Being platform independent is a sliding scale, in that I’m always kind of dependent on others for some part of all of this. That’s really landed with me with the announcement that Mozilla Social will be closing down next month. I loved the idea of Mozilla Social, and the organization’s decision to close it down is part of a larger disillusionment that I’m currently going through with those folks (though I admit that that disillusionment is based largely on vibes rather than a firm understanding of everything that’s going on there, so I have more work to do there, too). At the very least, I need to migrate one of my accounts to another Mastodon instance, and that’s been nagging at me since the announcement.

I’m wondering if it’s time to start my own solo instance and strike out on my own. I love the idea of Mastodon instances and public feeds on those instances, but it’s never worked 100% for me. Being on a Swiss instance for my personal stuff sounded fun, and I thought it might be a good way to encourage myself to post more in French, but I feel like an American drag on the instance and have only really connected with a couple of other accounts there. The dads.cool instance, by contrast, has been really great as a parenting/family-focused instance; it’s been my best Mastodon-as-Mastodon experience so far. That said, it’s been the exception, not the rule, especially since most of my Mastodon presence is a POSSE outgrowth of this blog rather than really being present on those communities.

It wouldn’t cost a huge amount per month to run my own instance with four accounts supporting my four subblogs, and I’m more and more convinced that that’s the direction I’m going to go in. I just learned how to do the DNS trickery to set up a subdomain like mastodon.spencergreenhalgh.com, and it would be good to have a relatively safe context in which to learn some more server skills, which has always felt like a weakness of mine. I also think that the main reason I hold up Mastodon as the ideal is precisely because it allows for this sort of thing, and even if there isn’t any immediate payoff for my teaching or research, being a social media-focused academic always makes me feel like I should be tinkering with stuff in this way.

• macro
• Myself
• POSSE
• Bluesky
• Mastodon
• Micro.blog
• Reeder
• RSS
• Twitter
• 2024 elections
• faith transition
• ICT 302
• Mozilla
• Mozilla Social
• Webmentions
• ActivityPub
• Day One