If you are on Facebook, you have probably noticed fewer and fewer friends are active there. But is that because they publish less, or because Facebook no longer shows it to you? Or maybe your friends just publish less because there is no point, if Facebook no longer shows their posts?
I mostly visit Facebook for one thing nowadays: to click the memory tab and watch how nice it used to be; when we shared our experiences with friends, when we had fierce discussions lasting, sometimes, for more than a hundred comments, when we organised events on Facebook, attended by dozens of friends.
Those times are now long gone. My Facebook bubble feels as if it has been reduced to a dozen or so friends. Some of them are still active, but Facebook simply does not show them to me anymore. Others have already left the site – because what’s the point of being there, if your only option is to scroll your timeline, which is dominated by promoted content that you never signed up to watch, and infested with AI generated slop?
The follies of Facebook
And it does not even work as a pay-for-play scheme. Some years back I tried to use Facebook’s advertising tools to reach more people with my content. It was not worth it. True, sometimes advertisements brought more visitors to my blog’s Facebook fan page. But while this brought me extra work, I spent a lot of time moderating unacceptable content, and there was virtually no change when it came to my blog’s readership or number of my podcast downloads.
It is understandable if we remember that Facebook does not work for us, it works for itself. There is no extra profit for Facebook if more people listen to my podcast – only if more people spend more time on Facebook. For that purpose, it does not even matter whether my paid advertisement brings in more people to listen and then comment on how wonderful my podcast is, or just a bunch of trolls who want to abuse me, because the guest on my podcast is a left-wing politician. I guess the latter would be better – for Facebook – because anger and outrage are more likely to generate further reactions and engagement.
Encouraging anger and outrage
And that’s only part of the issue. As Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has shown us, the owners of the sites can tweak the algorithm to suit their political agenda. This is why, before Twitter even became X, it changed into a right-wing cesspit. Manipulating algorithms can influence politics, as the impact of the Cambridge Analytica’s influence over the Brexit referendum can attest. This happens everywhere. Recently, an experiment was conducted in Germany, where researchers opened brand new accounts on TikTok and X, followed all the major political parties, engaged with each of them equally, and then let the ‘for you’ tab take charge. Soon, about 64% of content on X and 78% on TikTok was content supportive of the AfD, Germany’s right-wing party.
Social media has lost the social
But we aren’t on social media because we want to be exposed to right-wing propaganda. We signed up in the hope that it would help us to follow topics that we are interested in and connect with people we would like to be in touch with. The radical Twitter/X takeover by Elon Musk caused such a shock that people started to leave in droves.
While many companies tried to seize the moment by providing alternatives – including Facebook’s parent company, Meta’s own Twitter clone – Threads – many ‘refugees’ from X set up camp on Bluesky. It looked like a good solution for a time. But I cringe seeing people preaching that Bluesky is a new haven of free speech, and how the site is a new kind of user-controlled social media, free from the corporate world’s influence.
Is Bluesky any different?
I am sorry to crush your beliefs, guys, but you were taken for a ride. Bluesky promotes itself as decentralised social media, but even if you manage to set up independent servers, all traffic still goes through the nodes controlled by the Bluesky company. And I think we can safely assume that if the company has shareholders, investors and a CEO, it does not ‘belong’ to the people. Nor will it act in the interest of its users. Sooner or later, people who paid money towards it, will want to see returns on their investment.
We, as a product, are being fattened for now, so the company still takes care of our well-being. But the time of harvest will come sooner or later. This is nothing more than a corporate take on the pig-butchering scam. As soon as the users invest too much in the site to be able to easily abandon it, the focus of the company will turn away from keeping them happy, to keeping the investors happy – at the users’ expense. This mechanism has been described by Cory Doctorow, who named the process ‘entshittification’.
Is Mastodon an alternative?
But worry not. It’s not like we are doomed to be victims of the corporate social media, trapped in the endless circle of moving to a new site, and trying to make the best of it, before it needs to be abandoned due to enshittification. The Bluesky idea of decentralised social media is actually a good one, but we just need to go where it’s not only preached but truly practised. Fediverse is a loosely connected network of various social media protocols and hubs, where we can freely interact with each other. You might have heard about the flagship project of this community – Mastodon.
Mastodon is a truly decentralised social media. It is run by volunteers and maintained by a German NGO. It is truly decentralised, and it is not a closed garden like, for example, Facebook. You need a Facebook account to communicate with people on Facebook, and you can only communicate with other people who have Facebook accounts. Similarly, your Bluesky posts will only be shown to other Bluesky users (although gates to Fediverse exist). If you think about it, it’s a bit absurd. It’s like people, who have their email addresses on Yahoo only being able to send and receive emails with other people on Yahoo.
Fediverse is more like the old-school e-mail system, where you use Gmail, but you can still talk with your friend on Yahoo. And there is no algorithm deciding which emails you see in your inbox: it contains solely emails from your friends and mailing lists that you are subscribed to.
Do we need algorithms for the best communication?
The social media companies keep telling us that we need their algorithms to get the best social media experience. I find the opposite to be true, and I am going to show it to you based on a recent experience:
As you might know, I conducted a fundraiser to purchase a device to help the Ukrainian army. I was doing my best to promote it across my social media platforms, and the results might surprise you:
My experiment
I have approximately 900 friends on Facebook. Twenty-four hours after posting my fundraiser, I got 11 shares and eight reactions. Despite being shared by British and Polish journalists, with a much greater following than me, their own posts fared even worse than mine.
I am not an active user of X anymore, but I decided to share there too, hoping that some of my 8,000 followers would still see it. Result: two friends forwarded it, and I got one like.
I posted on Bluesky to my 2,300 followers. Within the first 24 hours, I got three forwards and four likes. It was posted by Bylines Network accounts too; between Scotland and their other accounts, they have over 100,000 followers. You would think a lot of people would see it, right? Numbers do not confirm it; 24 hours later, their post had nine forwards and eight likes.
I also posted on Mastodon, where I have about 1,500 followers. Two language versions of the post – Polish and English – resulted in 56 forwards and 35 likes.
To sum it up: my 1,500 followers-strong account on Mastodon fared eight times better in an ‘algorithm-free space’ than the Bylines accounts, with 73 times more followers between them on Bluesky.
Understanding the results
The promotion of my fundraiser gave me a chance to observe the comparison closely. But this is in line with my everyday experiences: I share my main social media activity nowadays between Bluesky and Mastodon, and while there is a certain bias (most of my Bluesky followers seem to be English speaking, while most of the people I interact with on Mastodon are Polish or from other European countries), I generally get the impression that Mastodon is much livelier – not only for chats and discussions, but I also get many more reactions and comments to the content I publish, whether it be my Polish language podcasts or my English articles. And interactions seem to be much more ‘human-like’, perhaps due to the lack of algorithms. People who observe my content tend to be people who are genuinely interested in viewing what I contribute, not just random users that algorithms have pushed my posts upon.
Fediverse has some downsides. It sounds a bit more complicated than corporate social media. It is indeed a much more intricate project, involving complex interactions between several independent entities. It doesn’t have the financial support that the big companies do, and it is sometimes a bit rough on the edges. Still, I would encourage you to give it a go, nonetheless.
Creatures of habit
While people seem to be put off by the fact that they have to choose from many servers (called ‘instances’) before they even start, opening an account is no more difficult than picking your email provider. If you are not sure, you can always play safe and pick one of the biggest providers. And don’t worry if you pick the wrong one – the beauty of the Fediverse is that you are not a slave to the site you created your account with. You can always move to another server (or instance) and take your followers and connections with you.
Avoiding the algorithm
Then when you are already on, remember, there are no algorithms. There is no ‘for you’ tab. Your welcome page will be completely empty. You need to populate your feed yourself, as the content on your ‘wall’ comes from the people you observed forwarding other people’s posts, or from posts tagged with a hashtag that you subscribed to. The best way to start is a bit counterintuitive. Start by following everyone you bump into. Only after your feed gets really busy, start shaping it by weeding out those who you are not really happy to see. I can guarantee that you will have a small community full of interesting people in no time. And then remember to toss a coin to your server’s admin: the network is maintained by volunteers. There are no big investors or corporate sponsors behind the scenes that keep it running.
I am still active on Bluesky, and I see many people there longing for truly free social media. We don’t need to wait for the Bluesky corporation to deliver on promises they gave us – especially when my bet is, that they will never do that. Instead, let’s focus our energy on helping to build the free social media that already exists.
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