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Lately I've been feeling like I use different social media for different purposes. Not, "status updates on Facebook, pictures on Instagram", but more like: Facebook is where all the regular people in my life can find me; Bluesky and Mastodon for the more adept; Geminispace devoid, as far as I know, from anyone I've ever met.
The freedom in that, of wandering in the land of invented names.
The irony is it used to be that way, back before social media companies started requiring real names (to ruthlessly track you, it turned out later). You could, and still can, be whoever you want online. I had a slight understanding of that when I was young - when I went by a nickname, nothing else. In the 90s I had my website, and my friends knew that; we visited each others' sites, and others, figured out how to do neat tricks (it was the era of neat tricks). I kept an HTML journal, then moved it to LiveJournal; by that time my friends list was a weird mix of people I knew offline and those I knew from various forums, or from late night chats on ICQ and AIM, or whatever else. It was eclectic. It was heterogeneous.
Some people I knew were smart - they used not just aliases, but different names altogether. Tweaked some details: impossible to trace. We all had our reasons to want to remain unseen. I didn't yet, but I would. I'd learn later.
Even though there was a mingling of my online and offline lives (which if we're being honest, I was never super comfortable with), it didn't feel so bad because by and large, people who were online in 2002 were people who wanted to be. Facebook was still years off. The iPhone even more so. You sat down at a creaky desktop and plugged your $15 headphones into a set of terrible Altec Lansing speakers (it was great).
Facebook collapsed everything. It was great to reconnect with some people; it was horrifying to reconnect with others. To have your suspicions confirmed, and to confirm suspicions about you. Posts spread so easily. Every time I was about to hit send, I thought about whether I wanted someone I knew from a couple of English classes in the late 90s to see it.
Which was about when I started posting less. My long quiet: I stopped writing creatively, for a bunch of reasons. My frenetic (insipid?) pace slowed. It wasn't depression, I don't think: I was learning to play guitar, starting my big software project. Despite being pretty quiet and unassuming, I've always had a lot of energy and the knowledge of an unknowable (and declining) number of years.
No, it wasn't depression, maybe more a sense of surveillance, of being watched. Not in the sense that I had unfortunately become accustomed to (my old website kept under tabs by people from my past, better search engines and my own carelessness making this possible [thanks, Google!]), but in a new, more chaotic way. I could write whatever I want. No guarantee anyone would see it. No guarantee _who_ would see it. Electronic Russian roulette and 0-6 bullets.
By the time I realized there were ways around this (visibility lists and the like), I'd sort of accepted that Facebook was not great, and was using it less. I was still posting on forums, though only sort of; Reddit hadn't completely consumed those, yet.
But ironically, it was getting on to Twitter, with its absolute lack of privacy settings, that got me to open up. I added a bunch of developers. I added a bunch of poets. Despite being open to everyone on the planet, there really wasn't anyone who knew me offline (which was ideal). I think I had 1300+ followers, which sounds like a lot, but when you consider the vagaries of Twitter's algorithm, the tiny handful of likes I might get, it was clear I wasn't being read much. Perfect. A couple years ago, before the site went down the toilet, I think I added three people I knew from growing up, none of whom I was worried about seeing my posts.
Twitter's dead (to me, anyway), but Mastodon and Bluesky carry on that tradition: regular people don't use either of those platforms. They use Facebook and Instagram. So as much as I hate Facebook, I should probably thank Meta for their containment field, that allows me to enjoy social media in a way that's largely separate from my offline life.
Bluesky's fine, but isn't taking off the way I'd hoped. Six months ago, that was my feel for Mastodon as well. And that's fine, because they seem to be solving different problems. Mastodon skews heavily technical, but also pulling in a certain type of person that's hard to pin down. Bluesky, trying to recapture the glory of early 2010s Twitter, was clearly meant for Posters; the sort of people who love dril (yawn), who speak knowingly about lowtax and Bean Dad, who see the outcome of their time online as the faint whiff of clout. As "number go up". One of my mutuals on the bird site sniffed at Mastodon, the same one who'd mutter darkly about not being able to get verified (back when it felt like that mattered) because of their peripheral role in a short-lived COVID internet phenomenon (iykyk).
Back when I cared about Mastodon more generally, back when I hoped it might get something more than the tiniest sliver of mindshare, this bothered me. But then I realized it was actually a blessing: I didn't, in fact, want all of the same people in all of the same places. Clout and audience are a trap. Silence is freeing. The fragmentation of the landscape after Twitter's purchase helped restore the context that almost two decades of social media hegemony had collapsed, and in doing so, moved me almost without realizing it to something better.