My social media audit for the end of 2024
January 04, 2025
Happy 2025.
I thought I’d do a small audit of my online presence for the end of the year. What sites do I use to publish things about myself? For what purpose? How has this evolved over time?
The trigger for this was me reviewing my personal expenses. For the longest time, I’ve been paying for Flickr Pro to host my photos. I paid once a year and for the past few years, I kept asking myself… why am I doing this? Is it worth it for me? This triggered a bit broader introspection.
For reference, here is a similar post from a very long time ago. Many of the sites mentioned there no longer exist, or I deleted my account on them. But I do keep using a few.
Preface
Before I dig in to specific sites, here’s how I think about Internet and (social) media landscape today, and how I see myself as part of that.
Internet and social media used to be a happier place. In the early days, it felt like we are all in this together, including the people and companies building these new things. We truly thought that we can harness the Internet for good, and create good faith hive minds and digital town squares for the betterment of our communities.
Fast forward to 2024, and (social) media is a far more sinister, cynical genre. Many sites and media channels now don’t hide that their true purpose is force the (political or oligarch) agenda of their owners down the throat of the audience, and not do any journalism or be a neutral platform. Low-quality AI slop pollutes everyone’s feeds and minds. Chinese and russian troll factories use any media to push their poison and propaganda into Western brains. Engagement farming and intentionally raising other people’s anxiety levels are a thing.
Many people mistake all of this to be the general state of the world: indeed, that is what many (social) media companies want you to think. But it is just not so. I remain optimistic about the state of the world and humanity; it’s just that (social) media now provides an increasingly dark and distorted picture of it.
russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 provides yet another twist on the whole media space. I changed my use of social media shortly after it happened, and posted a statement about the change, which has aged quite well. I do much of my social media usage these days not as my full self regular human being persona, but as a NAFO brain damaged cartoon dog. NAFO is an online movement that fights russian poison and lies, and collects material assistance for defenders of Ukraine.
I continue to use different sites for different purposes and with different personas. This site remains my home base, from where different things branch out.
Here are the sites relevant in this context, categorized into whether my usage of them decreased, remained the same, or increased.
Use less of
Twitter (X)
Rebranding Twitter to X must be one of the dumbest rebrands ever. So, it remains Twitter for me. It turned into garbage after Elon Musk bought it. Here is my longer writeup about how Twitter, and staying on Twitter, these days is harmful and amplifies the extremism and hate there.
I continue to use Twitter, but it is no longer a serious place, and my heart is no longer there. I just do my NAFO work, and I fully expect to get banned soon. I have exported all my content from there, and I have nothing to lose. I have been on Twitter since 2007 and I was sort of attached to it in the past, but letting go of things, especially intangible things in your head, is a valuable life skill. It is unhealthy and dangerous to tie yourself and your identity too much to any single social media account.
Facebook, Threads, Instagram
I still have a Facebook account, mostly because of Messenger and some private groups related to my kids’ activities. I find zero value in the public part of Facebook, and I deleted all my public content from there. (Kudos to Facebook for providing a tool that lets you review and delete all your past activity.)
I’m interested in social media as a tool where we make sense of the world and our communities. Facebook, Threads, and Instagram are intentionally designed to work against this purpose, and suppress political content:
“Meta’s decision to artificially limit the reach of political content on Threads, [Instagram, and Facebook] is itself a POLITICAL decision,” Judd Legum posted last year. “It privileges those who benefit from the political status quo by suppressing information that could disrupt the status quo while elevating entertainment, sports and other topics that do not threaten the powerful.”
Meta deems any content that discusses social justice or identity (things like LGBTQ rights, reproductive justice, etc) as “political”. The company says it will restrict any image, video, or text post that “identifies a problem that impacts people and is caused by the action or inaction of others,” which is an incredibly wide swath of content. If you speak about these things on Meta, your reach will be limited and your account will be surfaced to fewer people.
Meta’s undue restrictions on “political” content matter because social media has a profound impact on how people understand their communities and the world.
I tried out Threads, but I did not find any value in it. I just don’t seem to resonate well with Mark Zuckerberg and his universe any more.
Flickr
I have nothing bad to say about Flickr. To the contrary: I give it high praise, and can recommend using it. It is a rare example of an online thing that has not enshittified over many years, and just keeps doing its thing. I had photos on Flickr from 18 (yes, eighteen) years ago. Back in the day, Flickr gave me the code to embed them to my website, and these embeds just remained working for all these years. That is remarkable and worth praising, given that the modern Internet environment is such that no one gives a damn about the longevity of anything, and things break and get modified regularly with little warning.
Having said all that, I asked myself two questions: (1) why am I paying 70€ a year for Flickr Pro? (2) why do I keep all these photo galleries from my past publicly available there?
I simply decided that I don’t need to do either of these things any more. I ended my subscription, and replaced all the Flickr embeds on my blogs here with just regular images that I host myself. It was a lovely trip down the memory lane as I wrote some interesting travelogues in the past years that were now also interesting for myself to read and reflect upon. My Apple Photos albums also had got a bit out of control over the years as I had’t kept them all that tidy, so this prompted me to tidy up my local albums as well.
So, I still very much recommend Flickr if you need a reliable place to host and share your photos online. It’s just that this need disappeared from my own life.
RSS
I am very much a believer in open web, and the original vision of Internet: that anyone, anywhere can host and publish their own content, and that there are no gatekeepers. This blog and my own site is a small part of open web as well. People hosting their own blogs and reading other people’s blogs with RSS is a good example of open web in practice.
I used to read a lot of content via RSS with Feedbin and NetNewsWire, and was actively interested in NNW development. But over the past few years, this just… faded. I found myself not doing this any more because everything else (since 2022, this largely means russia’s invasion of Ukraine) took priority. It’s kind of sad and ironic that my open web and RSS use declined given how much I believe in the theory behind these, but again, letting go of things and not being religiously and fanatically attached to anything is a valuable life skill. So, I just canceled my Feedbin subscription and saved my subscriptions from there in a safe place for possible future use.
Again, I only have good things to say about Feedbin. (And I was one of their early users and was grandfathered into a ridiculously cheap plan until the very end now years later, which was totally unnecessary but very kind of them.) If you are looking for a good “RSS server” which aggregates things for you and provides a nice reading experience and backend for many RSS reader apps, definitely check it out. Same for NNW and many other RSS clients. I hope a day will come when I shift more of my media use back to RSS.
Unchanged
My LinkedIn use is unchanged in the sense that I haven’t been using it all that much to begin with. I have a profile there and I use it for some private messaging and a directory of professional profiles. But I don’t find much value in the content, feed, and social parts of LinkedIn. I very rarely post things there, mainly things that I think would be useful for people to see about me in a professional context. But LinkedIn was one of the early promoters of low-quality “AI slop” and provided AI writing tools for its users even before they took off in mainstream.
I don’t really trust the content on that site. I would never make judgements about anyone based (only) on what their feed and content look like, since it can all be gamed. I’m really not interested in any of the influencers and engagement type of activities going on there.
Use more of
Substack
I started a newsletter this year! The initial motivation for this was that I had written some threads on Twitter which I thought are worth preserving and re-publishing in a less toxic environment. So I queued some posts up and got a publication started. It’s like my second blog, focused on the topics around russia and Ukraine. I could also have hosted it on the open web, but I wanted to try a new service and see how it helps with distribution, since I do want this content to actually get in front of people. And I did not want to have this content here on my main site, since I want to keep this site more neutral and professional.
Substack is again VC-funded and at enshittification risk. It seems to be alright so far for me, both for publishing and for some of the long-form content that I subscribe to and read there. Some of my RSS reading has now shifted to Substack.
Bluesky
Here is my Bluesky. I use Bluesky these days mostly with my NAFO persona. It is working well as a Twitter replacement for me, and a real source of news and insights about russia’s invasion of Ukraine and everything around that.
I have my doubts about Bluesky. It is VC-funded, and most such things eventually enshittify. For now, I can say that I haven’t seen Bluesky management or owners inject themselves as forcefully into the discourse as Elon Musk has on Twitter, and moderation seems by and far alright so far.
These things may change, but the migration from Twitter to Bluesky was relatively painless for me and many other friends of Ukraine and NAFO. If Bluesky enshittifies too much, I think we would just move somewhere else again.
Mastodon
My Mastodon account is where I keep my professional and technical content, which these days is a lot about development on Apple and Flutter platforms. There is a happy subsection of Apple developer community that found a new home on Mastodon a few years ago after one of the numerous Twitter exoduses, living on both iosdev.space and other Mastodon instances.
Mastodon is the closest big social media platform to open web vision because it’s not VC-funded, and I think has the least risk of enshittification.
Conclusion
I’m on several platforms with different personas and goals. I don’t think there will be, or should be, a single privately owned social media platform where everyone is present. Our communities, societies, and the discussion networks that power them are too important to be exposed to the whims of any single VC-funded private entrepreneur.
Both Mastodon and Bluesky have a take on “federation”. I think by and large, social media federation is a good idea, and pretty close to the open web vision. In any case, my take from the past few years is that I expect multiple networks to thrive, rather than picking one single winner to tie my whole identity to.