The sudden flight to Bluesky has me thinking about the ongoing dilemma of picking a social network. As I wrote seven years ago in JSTOR Daily, I’m pretty skeptical about the idea of investing my time and energy in any for-profit platform; as the Twitter saga clearly shows, that just leaves us at the mercy of whatever the platform owner decides to do, and in any company that’s taken investment or gone to IPO, there are market pressures that may limit even the best-intentioned owner.
That’s why I was excited about Mastodon: The idea of a decentralized platform no one organization owns is hugely appealing, and I liked the idea of being part of a cooperatively owned/managed instance (cosocial.ca). But the experience of actually using Mastodon has been pretty siloed, so it hasn’t caught my heart or attention in any consistent way.
So that brings me back to WordPress. I’ve had a WordPress site for 20 years now (!!!), and there are no ways of connecting it to all these other platforms. I’m going to try using WordPress as a hub for my life online, posting out to all these different platforms, and then keeping an eye on responses to that I can stay engaged in conversations across platforms.
What’s missing from this picture is the listening side—the ability to keep an eye and ear on all these different platforms, from one place. Consumer-oriented listening tools (like Hootsuite used to be) have more or less disappeared or re-oriented to price points that only make sense for businesses/organizations. I’m shopping for a new option, and I’d welcome suggestions.
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