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Every so often, someone asks Cory Doctorow if he's going to sign up for Bluesky. I've seen a couple of these, and the answer is always no, with an asterisk: he isn't interested in new platforms unless he can exit without switching costs. Doctorow has a big following in the Fediverse: almost 60k followers (enormous, by Fedi standards - at time of writing, the 52nd most-followed account), and still posts on Twitter. Presumably his self-enforced rule is carefully constructed to exclude new services like Bluesky and Threads, and to allow him to keep posting on Twitter. Because if he's got platform concerns, I don't see how he reconciles that with continuing to post at a site owned by a fascist, that pushes violent posts, trolls, and fascist propaganda into people's feeds. But, I guess we each make our decision. I left last year and left behind a good chunk of my community, something that I haven't fully found elsewhere, and whose loss I've keenly felt for the last year and a half (more on that later).
But, I'm sure he has his reasons.
Doctorow calls this rule his Ulysses Pact (named for making a decision in a position of strength to protect your weaker self later), and I've thought about it more than once since I first heard about it. It is, in a sense, noble - if we all thought this way, corporate social media would be a graveyard, full of long-abandoned bots and dead brands, all the real people gone to Mastodon or wherever else. A bankrupt Musk, a humiliated Zuckerberg - couldn't we all just dream?
Oh, what a world that would be. And I think this has worked out for Doctorow, because he keeps updating his blog at a prodigious pace, keeps updating Twitter, and Mastodon, and whatever else. Clearly he's part of the tiny (and vanishing) fraction of people that can make Being Online their living, blogging and updating social media, and participating in lecture tours (though, I heard him speak earlier this year, and came away kind of underwhelmed).
But why has it worked out for him? Besides being Internet Famous (which works as a feedback loop), he has the advantage that his ouevre is in a sense the internet itself, and his readership are plugged-in, thoughtful, technologically adept. They are, essentially, the very people that the Fediverse was made for, and who make up its majority. If that's your subject, you can set up shop on Mastodon and be sure that a pretty sizable number of people will follow you there. But, what if you have other interests?
That's where it breaks down, and about which I can speak in detail. In September 2022, when Musk started to really take over, and there was the sense that Twitter was really going to go to shit, I started investigating alternatives. Mastodon, cohost, and other options - not just social networks, but other networks altogether. The web (via the small web/slow web, whatever you want to call it), Gemini (hi!), and others. The internet is, fundamentally, a way of connecting with others. But elsewhere I found a strange mix of friction and little traction, a deep quiet, and despite my efforts, difficulty connecting with others. Twitter was a sea of effluent, but there were all kinds of incredible communities hidden in the tide pools. For me, the most important was the poetry community. I got my first publication by submitting to a call for poems I saw retweeted on Twitter, then shared my work regularly, pinning my most recent publication; this in turn had an editor stumble onto my work, be impressed, get in touch, ask if I'd consider submitting a chapbook? It was life-changing, in a very small and specific way. And since leaving I've never quite found the same thing elsewhere.
Sure, there are poets elsewhere. A lot on Facebook and Instagram, somehow keeping abreast of things despite those sites' awful algorithms (ads, communities you don't follow, suggestions to follow the worst people you've ever met). There are some poets on Mastodon, but if I'm being ungracious, I'd say that a lot of the poets I've found there just mess around with little daily prompts, 5-7-5 haiku, that sort of thing. And if Mastodon was barren, cohost was a wasteland. I never found any serious poets there, my feed eventually becoming full of pornographic furry art. No lit mags, no poets, but lots of glistening cartoon tiger dongs.
I haven't checked Threads, and won't (my own line in the sand, I guess). Given, that, Bluesky is the closest thing I've found to the old Twitter poetry community, the community of the 2010s where we were celebrating our successes and subtweeting each other and the writer Tricia Lockwood tweeted at the Paris Review "So is Paris any good or not".
If I kept my purity intact, I'd be active here, on neocities, and on Mastodon, and my poetry community would be impossibly small. Off the top of my head, I can think of five or six of my peers (that is, poets who are part of the larger poetry community, publishing in lit mags, publishing chapbooks and/or trade collections, etc) who still keep up there. There's probably more. But they're hard to find. There are a lot of criticisms of the Fediverse, but I think the truest is around discovery. That was the knock on cohost, and that's the knock on Mastodon too. Twitter made it easy to find your community (because the big names were there, and you could hit up their follower lists), and Bluesky does the same through full-text search and via its excellent starter packs. But on Mastodon you have use and follow hashtags, hope you luck into people amid the noise. Make and use lists aggressively. Maybe there's a better way of doing it. I haven't found it yet.
I started this post out of something between frustration and jealousy. I'd love to be able to lay down moral imperatives, take a stand. But what I've always known, and which has been reinforced recently, is that users and community are not the same. Twitter has, still, hundreds of millions of people, and the poets I cared about were a tiny fraction, just thousands of the total. Facebook is similar, the people easy to find, the conversation not. Years ago my teenage self kept an online journal on vanity domains. My community was other teenagers making their own websites, keeping journals, posting digital photos. I knew I needed to be with them. So when I noticed that their sites were being updated less and less often, then largely abandoned, that people were getting into this thing called "LiveJournal", I moved too.
Because that's it, isn't it? You go where your people are, because you have to. You can go it alone, and likely stay that way. At least, if you're a regular person. Doctorow doesn't strike me as being in community with others in the same way most people are - more as someone who uses the internet as a form of broadcasting. When that's the case, when you move, people (or, at least, some people) will move with you. For everyone else, for us normal folk, if you pick up and go, there's a very good chance your people won't be there. I guess you'll have your principled stand? That and a suffocating, lonely silence.