In October 2024 I sat next to some smart Hertie School first year students during a talk, and learnt they'd never heard of the social network I was putting my best content on, bluesky. Considering the importance of political communication (especially just before the Harris/Trump election in the largest year of voting ever), I decided to create an updateable blog/sign post. As it happened, four weeks later (after the US election) I had 5 times more followers on bluesky than when I wrote it. So now I am preserving the original blogpost as a relic of its time.
tl;dr You don't need to read or do all the below, but if you're an academic or similar, you might want to read this short post I wrote in 2025 Advice on minimal academic social media investment.
Professional Social Media use as of January 2025
I spend time where I derive value, whether from learning or being seen. I also repost things largely where I see them, because I feel obliged to facilitate a media ecosystem that's growing organically, though I do try to maintain somewhat different personalities between my professional (presently bluesky and linkedin) and more personal/citizen (presently mastodon) accounts. (I do also have some other e.g. Meta accounts only mentioned in the longer, original post.)
This year I compare each of the below to the best political communication system I've ever seen: twitter with chronological feed and 140 character posts, about 2014. I keep meaning to write a longer article about why that worked so well.
- I'm getting most academic content and also political news from, and spending the most time on https://bsky.app/profile/j2bryson.bsky.social Followers 9.2K – after jumping from 1.1K to 6.6K in Nov & Dec 2024. Some informed interaction, but weirdly quiet compared to the other sites I use.
- I actually much prefer using https://mastodon.social/@j2bryson because it's editable and has a tapbots client; I post non-academic news, pictures of Berlin, rants, and jokes there. But I also use it to live tweet conferences etc. Despite having only 1.6K followers there, I get more useful geekery and feedback on mastodon than on bluesky.
- Note I've bridged my bsky and mastodon accounts to each other's platforms using https://fed.brid.gy/ so people using just one can see both posts (but bsky doesn't see mastodon edits, so mastodon is better for that too.)
- One of the great things about mastodon – if you learn something from people replying to one of your posts that's getting a lot of attention, you can edit the original post, and everyone who had reposted it gets a notification of the fix. (edit: 3 January)
- For a while I was still getting some news and interaction with communities not available elsewhere from https://twitter.com/j2bryson I don't read long-form posts there. Followers are still only down 1K from a 29K peak, though I'm largely not seen there probably due to shadowbanning. Since late 2025 there's very little left there I don't get elsewhere except brands and a few politicians and maybe two academics.
- I post longer form on LinkedIn somewhere between weekly and daily. I worry it's cutting in on this blog, but is not as archival. So I may find a tech fix for migrating content this direction sometime in 2026. Anyway, LinkedIn seems to be where the most people see and interact with my work, though I myself seldom read content there https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryson/ I have 17.5K followers there, but way more than 3x the interaction of bsky. Usually. I am starting to think maybe LinkedIn also engages in shadow banning, though it looks like they might be doing it with human editorial review, and then reduce your viewership for like a week on all your posts if they don't like something. They don't seem to like discussions of US tech misdeeds. But who knows, maybe that's just my followers. But I have heard similar experience from others.
Social Media use as of December 2024
I spend time where I get value. I also repeat things largely where I see them, I feel obliged to allow ecosystems to grow organically, though I do try to maintain somewhat different personalities between my professional (presently bluesky and linkedin) and personal (presently mastodon) accounts.
- I'm getting most academic and (now also) real-world news from, and spending the most time on https://bsky.app/profile/j2bryson.bsky.social (followers up 5.5K from mid october to 6.6k, fair amount of informed interaction).
- I still am getting some news and interaction with communities not available elsewhere from https://twitter.com/j2bryson I don't read long-form posts there, heck it was better when it was 140 characters and no recommender (followers down 1K to 28K, though I'm largely not seen there probably due to shadowbanning).
- I prefer using https://mastodon.social/@j2bryson because it's editable and has a tapbots client; I post non-academic news, pictures of Berlin, and jokes there, but also live tweet conferences etc. (followers up 100 to 1.3K) I get more useful geekery and more political feedback there.
- I post longer form on LinkedIn once in a while, and that's what the most people see and interact with, though I myself seldom read content there. https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryson/ (up 500 to 15K followers, but way more than 3x the interaction of bsky.)
Social Media use as of October 2024
My original post, from here on unedited.
Best Digital Governance / AI Ethics microblogging
Most visible, longer-form, approximately daily blogging
I used to get by far the most interactions and visibility on twitter, but now both of those are LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryson/ . Which is odd, since I myself can't stand reading the feed there.
about what I think I've posted that is really important, and also the most recent posts I've made.
The visibility of my LinkedIn posts is a bit of a problem for this blog, because I write things there I should really write here so they could be discoverable for longer. LinkedIn see themselves as the world's largest business magazine, and want you to write for them somewhere between weekly and daily (not that they pay you for that, beyond algorithmic rewards.)
Conference live blogging, daily microblogging of political opinions, news articles, cute animals, funny comics, lived experience, photos etc.
My favourite social media platform for its interface is Mastodon. Here's my account there https://mastodon.social/@j2bryson But to explain what I post there, I have to digress a minute into some history.
One of the many reasons twitter was interesting at least initially was because of who chose to follow me there. I was focussing entirely on behavioural ecology when twitter came out, but I got followed almost entirely by AI people, which made me realise I was still respected as an expert in that community. But then I found out that the Bath (England) tech scene used twitter as basically a community bulletin board for chatter. What to do? I created a second twitter account, j2blather. Then through the wonderful tapbots twitter client, tweetbot, I was able to both keep my main account fairly well curated, but also have another place to share interesting stuff I found that either I wasn't sure enough to want to associate with my "expert" account, or just was otherwise kind of professionally irrelevant but interesting, or even funny. That has all wound up migrating to Mastodon, not least because tapbots released a mastodon client, ivory. It is the best thing I have now for posting from other apps like the news apps on my phone, so my mastodon account became my blather account.
I didn't initially choose to make bluesky professional and mastodon blather. Another part of that was just the way the communities I followed on both places evolved, which also has to do with the concerns of the engines' builders, what they thought twitter had gotten "wrong." (In my own professional opinion, twitter got nothing wrong before about 2014, and they are fools to do anything but emulate the period when it became the best political communication network on the planet.) I love mastodon not only because of the far better interface but also the friendlier, more human interactions I have there, but it's pretty rare to have any real content engagement there. I mostly only get into professional discussions on linkedin anymore.
I have two Meta accounts but don't use them for work or allow them on my phone
I also don't allow linkedin or microsoft on my phone. I hope other people are helping make us resilient to apple or google going down, but I'm exposed to them and a handful of other apps.
Twitter is still where most people and tonnes of our history are
I have by far the most followers on twitter, and of course used to get the most interaction and visibility there. I got hit badly hit in the late 2010s by their stupid decision to use ML binning for automated feed construction. Since I don't limit myself to simply defined categories of topics, this made me less visible even to my followers, to say nothing about the shadow banning that I received after Google's ATEAC debacle led to some people blocking me for being too inclusive. Musk's purchase actually briefly helped me, but that changed: for a while you could literally watch a post start to take off then get squashed.
Even though I am shadowbanned and basically unseen except by a small number of followers when I reference them, I still use twitter because that's where people actually are. As I said last year in an underviewed blogpost about physical smart cities, twitter is a city that's been taken in a war on information. It's still sufficient infrastructure as a comms system that we still should still try to take it back. Even if we fail, hopefully the effort will help us learn to defend other transnational digital utilities.
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