Marco Arment blogs about community and his break from Mastodon:
My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go.
The social web is fragmented now. There’s no longer an obvious “quit Twitter and go to Mastodon” answer like there used to be. The solution is more blogs, of course!
@manton blogs are what I blogged we should do too!
@jsonbecker Cool, just reading your post now. I agree!
@manton Well, it depends very much of the personal bubbles, profession, and what you seek.
In my region, you are isolated if you don't use FB groups or Whatsapp. I never got the easy professional connections of very old Twitter times and they don't exist today, nowhere. I love Mastodon. It's lived democracy.
I don't believe in blogs alone: you need social media to promote a blog. Blogs get invisible in search, spammed by scraping bots, at worst copied by AI.
@manton preach! The web was, and is, the he answer.
@manton that was a good post. The reality, as he’s finding, is that we all have to make compromises in different parts of life and social media is no different. I’m finally learning the same thing along the way and I’m a hell of a lot older than Marco so good on him ;) In the case of X I think Gruber is full of it when he says it’s a nice place. It’s not a nice place, but you can certainly find a secluded spot there that is. The only reason I see political stuff on X is because I, idiotically, look for it on occassion. The great thing about “the algorthim” there is that it adapts very quickly. If I stop looking at/for that stuff it stops recommending it. My current timeline is full of cat and dog videos.
@NatureMC hard disagree. there are plenty of options to direct people to a blog. I see them all the time in my stats. I don’t post any of it to social media at the moment yet the readership is there. I think you’re right that there is probably a good mix but I don’t think one needs to be on social media to promote a blog.
@jasonkratz I don’t even use the default algorithm there. I mostly just look at a handful of specific people, and then sometimes the “tech” algorithm. Zero politics.
@jasonkratz Please tell me about those non-social-media promoting possibilities, I'm curious and like to learn.
You know, I'm blogging as a journalist since the first blogs ever. And if I want to get more than 100 readers, I have to do a lot - and do much more than some years ago, when AI slop poisoning internet search didn't exist yet.
@NatureMC Kagi Small Web and blogroll.org to name two. Also depends on your blogging platform of course. Bear has a discover page. Pika has Pika Pulse. micro.blog has a Discover page. Ghost and Substack obviously have discovery. There are others.
@manton I'm completely with you in that point. I always told people they should have their own webspace as an anchor, open for people.
Therefore, that self-isolation of people in walled gardens is so dangerous. But frankly, I don't have a solution for such cases: in my region, people fight against a corrupt mayor. FB groups/Whatsapp. Impossible to organise that via blog. All others are excluded. How to get these people into open, democratic structures? I don't know.