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 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 I got hit badly 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.

Anyway, I'm afraid I can't myself understand reading it, but I get by far the best interactions on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/bryson/ . In fact, it's a bit of a problem 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.) If you want me to see your posts there, please tag me, don't DM the post (or long letters) to me. But 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. 

Conference live blogging, daily microblogging of political opinions, news articles, cute animals, funny comics, lived experience, photos etc.

Twitter was interesting in part because of who chose to follow me there. I was focussing entirely on behavioural ecology when it 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 account, j2blather. Then through the wonderful tapbots twitter client, tweetbot, I was able to both keep my main account fairly curated, but also share somewhere interesting stuff I found that either I wasn't sure enough about to comment on as an expert, or just was otherwise kind of professionally irrelevant but interesting. That has all wound up migrating to Mastodon here https://mastodon.social/@j2bryson Not least because tapbots released a mastodon client, ivory. 

I didn't initially choose to make bluesky professional and mastodon blather. That was more just the way the communities I followed there evolved. 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 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. Anyway, enough said.

Twitter is still where most people and tonnes of history are

Even though I am myself shadowbanned and basically unseen except by 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 but 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.