It has now been approximately 6 months as I’ve completely uprooted my media site usage from Reddit towards Tumblr and the Fediverse (Mastodon and others). I didn’t think that such a change would provide me as much perspective as it did. But I’ve found a lot that I want to say.

As is obvious but should still be clearly stated: Media sites are gigantic constructs and no person could ever seriously gain a complete overview over them. My statements therefore should not be seen as general statements about the entire community of these sites. Instead, they can be seen as my experiences of going into these sites trying to get the best out of it. How applicable this is to you will depend on your cultural proximity to me.

One may have noticed that I did not call these sites “social”, merely “media”. This is primarily because I find the term so overused that it inspires as boring critiques as “social media is not social” and also because my intended usage of all of these sites is decidedly not interpersonal.

Reddit

This antisocial position I’ve probably inherited from Reddit, which I’ve been extensively using for years. Split up in such-called “subreddits”, Reddit has a specific forum for most niche (and not so niche) hobbies and interests. Within these communities people can submit, “upvote” and “downvote” (effectively giving -1 upvote) posts. The main feed used by people shows posts with most upvotes, but importantly the older a post gets, the more it gets “weighed” down in the ranking. In practice, a very popular post tends to stay at the top for about a day.

Users on Reddit in general do not have a specific following or if they do, this following is mostly based on recognisability in their posts to a specific community. This means that a successful post is not really bound to already having a following or being boosted by someone with an existing following, but rather by how well one can appeal to the tastes of a particular community.

In practice, this means larger Reddit communities are driven by the lowest common denominator and smaller Reddit communities can be manipulated and/or fall off the rails of what can be considered sensible thought. Somewhere in-between, great communities of like-minded people may be found and there’s an aura of egalitarianism in the sense that content success is independent of a user.

Tumblr

What drove me most to Tumblr was mostly pure curiosity. I was only vaguely aware of its troubled history and how it even still functions today. Turns out it does! It also demonstrates that at least in the niches I am active in, content is not sparse even if Tumblr’s cultural relevance is long-gone.

The next shock I had was probably when I found that Tumblr did not only have a content algorithm, but that such algorithm wasn’t half-bad. I know it’s very in style to romanticise the chronological timelines and following people, but I need to admit that this has not worked for me much.

Time to take a few steps back. Tumblr is a traditional feed-based social media where all your posts get sent to “one place” and then others may follow your blog to see your new posts in their chronological timeline. There is also a tagging system which is in-part used to follow specific topics of your interest, but I’ve found that such tags are often points of attack by bots and very, very annoying people. Users have the ability to “reblog” the posts of others which they can either do directly, basically just sending the post to their follower’s timelines or add upon the post by adding a comment below which now has become “part of the whole post” and the entire thing can be reblogged by others again. There are also likes which apparently help the algorithm.

The reblog is the heart and soul of Tumblr and as such all its benefits and problems are found within it. The comment section of Tumblr posts is so underbaked that the main way to reasonably comment on a post is to reblog it and add a comment. This means if you decide to correct a horrible person, all your followers now get to see said horrible post, Fun! Alternatively, it means that you have been a very special kind of self-entitled to think that everyone else has to see the hilarious conversation you’re having with your friends (every back-and-forth adding yet another full post to people’s timelines).

Of course, users of the site will now protest that there is their hacky alternative to comment on posts is to write their entire message in a tag. This means that followers now see your comment just as some gray text below, and your comment cannot be reblogged. Except wait! People screenshot what others have written in the tags all the damn time. Each post even has the convenient function to see all tagged reblogs.

Culturally, Tumblr feels like walking through the ruins of an old society, which I would have hated living in. It is haunted by some of the worst surviving members of this era, but also some very nice and sensible people. Just know that you will be hearing all the interests of said sensible people, even if you only care about one of theirs. Filtering their posts tends to depend on their mercy to include one of the filterable expressions or tags.

Despite these complaints, in terms of raw content, Tumblr has been great. Once I learned to navigate it and followed the right people (and blocked like 300 people), I’ve found it a consistently enjoyable experience. Turns out if you have a “dead” social media in terms of monetisability and cultural influence you also get to say goodbye to some of the most annoying people and a lot of cool creatives stay.

Fediverse

This will be the most subjective section for a few reasons. Firstly, this is the most decentralized social media because it’s basically just a shared protocol. I am active mostly in tech spaces full of very internet (sic) people. I’ve stayed away from both too large instances and the horrible instances.

What is the Fediverse? Explaining it to people, what I’ve found the most useful is the email metaphor. You choose a homeserver, for example gmail, and then you can converse with everyone else on other servers e.g., hotmail (as long as the two servers haven’t blocked each other). The most common software running on those servers is Mastodon, although I personally find it horrible to use and as such have opted for other instances.

In actual usage, the Fediverse is basically just Twitter, except no ads and no large audience. You can follow, “boost” (retweet), reply, like etc. It also a lot of nice quality of life features, but very notably: No notable algorithm. You will find all your content through search functions and chronological timelines. And the folks in Fedi can be happy to see that they’ve changed my opinion: I now want to have some kind of content curation algorithm.

The general adage you will get from evangelical members of the community is that algorithms are evil, discriminatory and faulty (all true). On Fedi you control what you see! Just follow some cool people, see who they boost and if you like what those people say, also follow them. Done! Now admittedly, 6 months may just be small on the timescale of doing this, but I’ve been very unsatisfied with this.

The “90% of everything is garbage” has been thrown around often, but I’ve never felt it as much as my time on fedi. I want to make a clear distinction here between the actual people and what they post. Namely, I’ve been incredibly impressed by how knowledgeable and helpful the communities on fedi are. The problem is just: They are boring and unfunny.

I don’t know how else to put it other than bluntly that even after a 6-month configuration of muting and blocking people, I still have not found a feed where I’m not annoyed by half of all the posts that go by.

My favorite threads were ones which weren’t particularly about drama or polarized, but still had interesting discussions going on. Being engaged with others and in generally a trustworthy environment where you could feel safely that you wouldn’t be attacked by idiots and attention seekers was wonderful.

Sadly, this does not seem to be the priority of basically any user I’ve found. The users who do these things certainly exist, but they also still have the majority of their posts fall in the general detritus of: Things you expect in direct messages of private chats, unfunny jokes, old memes, self-important congratulations to the community (with triple digit boosts) and pseudo-philosophical statements which probably haven’t been thought about longer than it took to write them.

I did not feel like my time was respected on that platform.

Me

Senseless Negativity is worth less than nothing, and I’m aware of this. As such, it is important to say that the negative points I’ve mentioned about all of these media sites should not be seen as indictments of the sites or their communities but revealing statements about me.

What do I even want to achieve on these sites?

I am not here to make friends on the feed. I do not even like the feed. A feed is a horrible place you spit all your stuff into to have it show up in front of other people without context about you or any consideration by you. A chronological feed is best dominated by posting much and appealing to the crowd. An algorithmic feed is best dominated by appealing to the algorithm.

I am first and foremost not interested in the most exciting recent thing (although there are exceptions). There are great old things in the hobbies I’m invested in.

Connected with not being all that interested in making friends on the feed: My interests are strictly aligned with topics, and as such, it is incredibly jarring to have any media site force me to prioritize following people instead of topics. I’m still very cynical about Reddit’s wisdom of the crowds, but at least it tends to guarantee that I do not see hundreds of irrelevant things.

It is obviously true that algorithmic social media does not respect your time, in the sense that their algorithms and entire design is set up to get you addicted. But it can’t be that the solution to that is first and foremost to just show me useless content.

Also if you are interested in any topic except for tech, your experience will be 10 times worse than mine. Fedi is a bubble.

How to fix it

It is obviously ironic how I’ve complained about self-importance, and now I title a section like I have found the secret to social media. This is not the case. But thinking of how to build an ideal place for me is an important mental exercise to further explore what I actually want.

There are some obvious preconditions which need to be fulfilled, namely the existence of enough content for my interests. Barring that, I should be able to find this content relatively easily. The gold standard for this is probably the YouTube algorithm, which, despite its banal evilness of stealing hours in my day, is unprecedented in giving me content I enjoy.

Now assuming that an algorithm is not an option due to ethical concerns (despite me thinking the YouTube algorithm is a source of good for me, it has probably been a force for bad in the world.), the alternative is cataloging by topic, users and/or chronologically. I’ve already expressed my dislike of the “follower” model (and it can get so much worse if you go into more populist media sites), so then this would be topic and chronologically. Reddit can be great for this up to a certain degree of topic nicheness.

I think r/ProgrammerHumor being unfunny to most serious programmers still exemplifies best why generally any populist system of an unpersonalised “feed” tends to fail at a certain popularity.

Well, here’s an interesting thought: My main problems with the “follower” based model tend to be based around the vanity of the “celebrities” of those platforms and how my time tends to be wasted. One very intriguing way would be to “unsocialise” the space on a chronological timeline. You don’t get more of my time just because you made more posts.

In the most basic sense, this means having people again needing to cultivate their “own space” on the internet instead of vomiting unto a feed. This could for example be their own website/blog. (This is incidentally also why I post these things unto this website instead of spamming them in parts into feeds. Thread 1/712).

Notably this of course clashes with the idea of discoverability, if there is no shared “feed” how am I supposed to find cool people? I do not know.

Admitting Defeat

From the above statements, one might conclude that in the end, I am just not made for social media. I should stay in my chatrooms, YouTube and blogs. And sometimes the obvious conclusions are the correct ones.

But adding some nuance here, I don’t think these new feed-based social media are a net-negative on my life. As I’ve said in the beginning, they provided me with a lot of perspective. Indeed, I think that in general hopping around social media sites and getting into different social spheres is some of the healthiest things one can do on the current social media hellscape.

I might hop a bit more if the annoyances continue to pile up, but until then, you might still see me on the feed. Just don’t try to make friends with me.