Notes: Is Organic Social Media Dead?

site/notes/2024/Is Organic Social Media Dead.md

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+---
+title: Is Organic Social Media Dead?
+subtitle: If you know Betteridge’s Law, you know.
+summary: >
+    There are easy critiques to make of Bluesky etc., and they are mostly wrong. There are also *deep* critiques, and they may be right.
+
+image:
+    cdn: organic-social-media-dead.png
+
+date: 2024-12-09T08:02:00-0700
+
+tags:
+    - social media
+    - writing
+    - open web
+
+---
+
+[Jake Meador][jake] has been closing [his newsletter][newsletter] lately with a variation on this theme:
+
+> PS I know there’s lots of chatter right now about the new social media site—[the butterfly site that replaces the bird site by basically being what the bird site was five years ago][bluesky-newsletter]. I am not planning to make the jump. Organic social media is dead. The future of healthy, worthwhile media is independent, subscription-based media projects plus curated email newsletters—which means my energy will continue to be focused primarily on Mere O with bits of time in the margins going toward this. So you can continue to find me right here. That said, we do have a Mere Orthodoxy account on the butterfly site so if you’re on there you can [find us here][mereo-bluesky].
+
+[jake]: https://jakemeador.com
+[newsletter]: https://buttondown.com/jakemeador
+[bluesky-newsletter]: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/11/bluesky-bubble-twitter-replacement/680679/
+[mereo-bluesky]: https://bsky.app/profile/mereorthodoxy.bsky.social
+
+A couple points of disagreement:
+
+1. Bluesky is trying to be the best parts of what Twitter was 10–15 years ago, not 5 years ago. Which is part of why it has felt fun. It may not last! But it’s doing sufficiently different things that it’s not guaranteed to be enshittified the way Twitter etc. have been.
+2. Organic social media is not dead. It might be dead to you, but that’s a different thing. Turns out it still works just fine (you know: like Twitter did 10–15 years ago) when the platforms don’t go out of their way to kill links because they don’t have to try to keep you on the platform at all costs for ad revenue!
+
+Now, Jake’s first link there is to an Ian Bogost piece at <cite>The Atlantic</cite>, which does not argue so much that it *is* dead as that it *ought* to be. This is a take with which I am [deeply sympathetic][breaking-up]; it is for good reason that although I [do use social media][returning], I also take regular breaks from it—in [Advent (now)][advent], Lent, and usually once mid-summer as well.
+
+[breaking-up]: https://v4.chriskrycho.com/2019/breaking-up-with-social-media.html
+[returning]: https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/reluctantly-returning-to-social-media/
+[advent]: https://v5.chriskrycho.com/journal/life-update-advent-2024/
+
+That is, however, a different thing from Jake’s actual claim! Organic social media has as much life to it as ever, *when the platform is not eating itself*. Whether Bluesky will properly resist that in the long term, who knows. There is a reason I am using *this* social media hiatus to “bootstrap” a much more active [Notes section][notes] on this site (inspired directly by [Simon Willison][sw]), which I intend to carry forward when I do eventually return to social media. I have long agreed, and continue to agree, with [Alan Jacobs][aj] on this point: [own your turf][oyt].
+
+So: long story short, I more or less agree with Jake about the relative value of these things, *and* I think there’s still good to be had from open social media—and I think Bluesky is doing much more than a lot of easy criticism of it gives it credit for.
+
+[notes]: https://v5.chriskrycho.com/notes
+[sw]: https://simonwillison.net
+[aj]: https://blog.ayjay.org/substack-vs-indie/
+[oyt]: https://blog.ayjay.org/on-blogging/