v

Been trying to get into the habit of using Instagram, which has always been a very intermittent site for me. It's a little funny to be putting this effort into engaging with a platform that I hear my friends complaining about so much, that's run by a company that I ideologically disagree with, that is notorious for copying features from other services & then steamrollering them, but...

... also there's interesting stuff there. The split between Posts and Stories is something - I have never quite gotten into watching Stories, there's too much noise with the people I follow & I can't skim, which still frustrates me. But then, just often enough, there's something genuinely interesting posted by a person I actually care about, and which I wouldn't've seen on any other platform - in other contexts, it would be too trivial, too much of a boast, too public. Maybe in a small Discord... but also posting energy is different from chat energy, the default audience is the void rather than a specific group of people, and Stories has that too.

But the biggest thing that feels different & good about Stories is the way that a reply is a DM. What a great way to reduce the threshold for starting a private conversation! On Twitter you have the joke phrase "sliding into her DMs", and part of that is the unambiguity of what you are doing when you escalate the conversation from a public one to one that is in direct messages. Like whispering to someone at a party, it assumes a lot of familiarity! A high risk move! But on Insta, that's the only way to reply to a thing someone has posted, so it's not weird to respond "oooh, yum" to some food, "cute!!" to a friend's new kitten, "oh, where is that?" to a nice landscape shot. And now you're talking in a private space, and maybe that conversation goes somewhere, or maybe it doesn't... or maybe it doesn't initially but then it does over days or weeks or years of seeing fragments of each other's lives... it's a nice dynamic.

And comparing that against platforms like Cohost & Bluesky, where for very reasonable reasons there aren't DMs at all, and if you wanna have a side conversation with someone you either have to dig up their email, or you have to already be talking with them elsewhere... it's different. Not even necessarily worse. But definitely different.

i think the posting cadence on Cohost is interestingly slower than elsewhere. obviously some people are still posting like it's going out of business, but most of the people i am really glad to follow post like... somewhere between once a month & a few times a week? which is me, too. it's a nice cadence, makes Cohost feel like a confederation of blogs. which actually makes me feel like the timeline format is not quite right, and actually a list of people you follow, maybe with a count of updates you've not yet seen, in rev-chron order might work better. something that i feel there's a good chance of someone building once the API rolls out?

of course, the context for all this is me reflecting over the design choices i'm making for Downpour, which i also imagine will have this kind of posting cadence, and which does move away from the timeline and towards this kind of format ¹. social media has been tied to the timeline for so long! and it's a good solution to a lot of problems, but also... it's good to try other solutions, get weird with it after a long time stuck with the same Three Websites.

1. there's variations in the way to format this "list of people you follow" presentation. what i'm proposing for Cohost is basically the sidebar from Google Reader, but i'm going for something that's a bit more like Spring '83.