Guidance to my social media communications as of October 2024

I sat next to some super smart Hertie School first year students during a talk this week and they had never heard of the social network I'm putting my best content on. Given the present political context, I thought I should switch from an annual cross-networking posting of that to a guidance blogpost I can update.

Best Digital Governance / AI Ethics microblogging

Presently I am producing and consuming the best microblog (that is, frequent daily post) Digital Governance (and related sciences) content on Blue Sky, here https://bsky.app/profile/j2bryson.bsky.social. This has just happened organically. My policy has been to build a profile on every social medium that might be useful, and then follow the measures I used to build a great information network on twitter before it went recommender.  Right now this is working best here.

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.

If you want me to see your posts there, please tag me, don't DM the post (or long letters) to me. I see almost nothing organically in the feed. I post not only occasional good articles, but also advertisements for upcoming talks and my school. If you look at my profile page though, you can see "featured articles" at the top
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 once put the facebook app on my phone, saw that it was dropping posts from people I followed, realised they cared less about data integrity than I did, and deleted it almost immediately. This was 2008, when it first came out. Nothing has ever made me regret the decision since.

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.