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.
It's hard to say why exactly, but it feels a bit like...
Most social media now is algorithmic, and algorithmic timelines are more designed to deliver streams of "content" to "consumers". They don't encourage the everyone-is-posting-and-interacting way that social media traditionally worked.
A lot of social media is enclosed behind loginwalls now, and I think we both have a younger cohort that doesn't remember the older public web at all, and an older cohort that's starting to forget what it was like. The enclosed social web lends itself more to the creator-consumer dynamic than it does to posting.
