So, there's a bunch of stuff that I could be talking about tonight, but social media is on my mind. And I should say, this is my second take. These episodes don't usually call for second takes, but the first recording of this was just me ranting. Not in a productive way. And it was dumb. So, I'm thinking a lot about social media this week for a few reasons.
There are now four prominent text-based social media apps. Twitter, Blue Sky, Threads, and Mastodon. We're going to throw Mastodon out the window. Mastodon is basically a place where maybe three people interact with me. If I was still in the web development space, Mastodon would probably be the best place for me. But I don't care for it. I've never cared for it. I still don't care for it.
Threads, I deactivated earlier this week because, in my opinion, it is the worst one. The notifications are intrusive, obnoxious, and useless. The trifecta. I hated that I would see Threads notifications in Instagram only to go and be like, Hey, this person that you said hi to one time ten years ago posted their first thread. Or hey, this might be useful, and it's never useful. I really only want to know when people directly interact with me. And Threads is just the worst.
Plus, the algorithm was terrible. The algorithm is terrible. My daughter wants another Mickey Mouse movie, so I'm going to give her that in the ten minutes before bedtime. But Threads' algorithm is the worst one. And the people, in my opinion, outside of Twitter, are the meanest. It's like all the mean people who didn't like Twitter's politics left Twitter and went to Threads. And so when your post on Threads takes off, if people find it disagreeable, they're just kind of dicks. So I hate Threads. I deactivated it. I cannot see myself going back there unless they get rid of their algorithm or make it so that you never see the algorithm.
Which leaves me with Blue Sky and Twitter. Twitter has been increasingly useless to me. The joy-to-annoyance factor has gone way down. There's virtually no reach on the platform anymore. And it shows me things that I don't care for, even after 15 years of carefully curating this stuff. The main thing that was keeping me on Twitter was sports. And virtually all of the sports people I followed moved to Blue Sky, except for Jeff Passin. I assume he'll be there soon. And John Boy Media, I also assume will be there soon. But they also have their own substack. So there are other places where I can follow those people.
And then the other side of that is that Publr, my social media sharing app of choice, which is really good. Supports a lot of things. It's one of the few lifetime deals from AppSumo that I actually use. Because I'm on a lifetime deal, they have to start charging extra for Twitter because of the ballooning cost and API. It just feels like everything that Twitter has done in the last year and a half or two years has been user hostile. And if there was value to being there, that's fine. But I don't see any value in being there either.
Which leaves me with Blue Sky. Blue Sky has been fun. It's fun now. Critics don't get you deprioritized. There's no algorithmic feed. So you see only what you want to follow. I don't know if that's sustainable. And also, I don't want to make this sound the way it's going to sound, but it feels like most of the people who have been following me on Blue Sky lately have their entire identities wrapped up in politics. And that's true of people on Twitter, too. I've just managed to filter them out.
I have many words blocked. Many accounts blocked. And so I don't see most of the annoying far right things on Twitter unless I wander into the trending topics area, which most of the times I don't see because I use a plugin called Minimal Twitter. But now on the other side, we'll say far left, people have moved to Blue Sky. And I don't feel like it's going to be a fun place for long. I could be wrong, but I'm really thinking about the value social media brings in 2024, 2025 for me. I've uninstalled most social networks off of my phone. I still have LinkedIn, which is fine. I still wander into Instagram on the web, which is just a real bad experience. So I don't know.
I guess I guess what I'm thinking through is there are now four prominent text based social media apps. Are any of them worth it? Certainly not for growth strategy, I don't think. But it feels like there's a better way to spend my time. That's what I'm thinking about on a Friday night at almost 730 p.m. Eastern Time before I put my kids to bed. So I don't have any conclusions to that. I think something's definitely going to change for 2025. Typefully seems like a good solution if I decide to stay on Twitter because it could just be a one way street where I never log into Twitter and I just post stuff from Typefully and they have Blue Sky support now, too. So we'll see.
I don't know. I'd love to hear from you if you have thoughts. I feel like four text based social media apps is too many. I just found myself bouncing around them this week. And so I don't know.
Let me know what you think. I am on Blue Sky. CasaBona.org is my handle, I guess. So let me know. Respond to this email. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Bye. Bye.