Anyway, this is all just furthering my feeling that the era of social media as we knew it is over.
With Twitter still dying (active users down 30% in the last year!), I've seen more and more discussion of where everyone's going - but what I'm seeing is that most users aren't. The numbers don't line up; more people are quitting twitter than are joining Bluesky or Mastodon or anything else. Which is what makes me think the era of participatory social media is ending.
This isn't just because of twitter dying. I remember reading in Garbage Day a year or two back that Twitter was seeing active posting go down in the early days of the pandemic. People kept using group DMs, but stopped posting. And as much as Adam Mosseri's "people aren't posting, they're just sharing links in group chats" comment has to do with the site culture he built, it's the same phenomenon - many normal people pulled back from posting like they would have before. Meanwhile, the fastest growing things were TikTok and Youtube, which have a highly stratified audience/creator relationship that's more like traditional media, and Discord and Telegram, which are non-public facing social media.
There are people like us who post, who need to post to survive. But it seems like for a lot of people they're simply losing interest, or are happy to settle into a more passive relationship where they "consume content" but don't post.
I was thinking earlier about how the value of Cohost, in part, was that it's a space where I didn't feel pressured to post. Like, it's a user culture and UX where 'your silence speaks volumes' was always a joke and only a joke. I always felt comfortable not commenting on the discourse or news of the day if I didn't think I had something to add.
This in contrast to the microblogging platforms where people absolutely will constantly quote-tweet some piece of news or some chunk of discourse just to add "this sucks!" or whatever. Cohost allowed for silence which just turned the signal to noise way up; if someone was posting it was typically for a good reason.
I also note the phenomenon of people who posted a lot on other platforms, came here, and became lurkers on Cohost. I think some people don't actually need to post, or don't need to post so much, and once the pressure is removed (either through platform design or just a 'break' that makes them quit the old platforms), they stop.
