Guidance to my social media communications

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. Given the political context of the time (just before the Harris/Trump election in the largest year of voting ever), I thought I should create an updateable blogpost. In fact, within four weeks I had 5 times more followers on bluesky, so now the below seems an important relic of that time.

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 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.)

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.)

Social Media use as of October 2024 

My original post, from here on unedited.

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.