The Fragmentation of New Media

What will emerge from the current chaos?

Today, I signed up for Bluesky and Threads, taking a brief look at each of them, and announced my final departure from Twitter, to take place when Musk removes the Block feature[1]. Meanwhile I’m still using Mastodon as my main microblog along with this blog and Crooked Timber for long-form blogging. I’m trying to maintain a couple of Substack newsletters and commenting on Substack Notes. And I still post occasionally on Facebook.

This is clearly too much, but it reflects the transition from the Facebook-Twitter era of “social media” (with blogs as a holdover from a more optimistic past) to whatever comes next. I’m going to make the case for a combination of Mastodon and Substack as the way forward.

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Mastodon isn’t perfect (clunky interface, and deliberately low-key), but the starting point of the Fediverse is the right one, in two crucial respects.

First, there is no owner and no advertising. We’ve seen the disastrous effects of advertising-driven management with FB and Twitter, and I can’t see any way to fix them.

Second, and probably more importantly, it’s the polar opposite of the assumption that everyone should be, and has a presumptive right to be, on the same platform. You join an instance you like, with confidence that anyone behaving badly will be thrown out. You can then link with other instances which follow the same rules. Instances that deviate too badly will be defederated. The result is that, whereas I use Twitter’s block all the time, I’ve never had to block anyone on Mastodon.

The result of these rules is that there is a lot less debate. I’m happy with that. I see no value in arguing with rightwingers, and not much with reply-guys in general. YMMV.

Turning to Substack, it is in many respects, a renewal of old-style long form blogging, but with email newsletters as a central feature. The big difference is the subscription model, under which only paying readers get unrestricted access to the newsletter and, often, to features like comments. That reduces the amount of interaction between writers and readers and, particularly among writers. The Notes feature is a step towards more interaction, but hasn’t yet taken off. A silver lining is that, at least for me, the existence of far-right substacks has barely impinged on the experience.

The subscription model is, I think, unavoidable. The starting point is the recognition, evident from the decline of the original blogging model, that most people don’t have the free time and energy to write regularly for no monetary return. As Dr Johnson put it (from memory) ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’.[2] Once that’s recognised, it’s better to get a return from subscriptions than from advertising.

For the moment, I’m spreading myself far too thinly across lots of media, waiting to see what emerges from the current chaos. How about you?

fn1. Being Musk, he may not go through with it. And I’ve seen suggestions that some combination of EU laws and the requirements of the Apple store make a block option unavoidable.
fn2. Academics like me are a special case. Communicating with the public is part of the job, at least as I understand it.