Dunno which social network to join? Follow the news

Going on pure gut-feel here, no analysis to back it up.

For the last few weeks, Bluesky has been growing in popularity and more people are joining the network. However, I’ve been enjoying time on Mastodon, using that a fair bit. Although there are still plenty of people on Twitter.

And, to be honest, checking three social networks and posting on each one is a bit cumbersome. So you want to know who posts where and what you’re getting in to.

Three news items have made it easier to work out who hangs out where, as the responses to each event collected thoughts and opinions and reposts and replies. The news was:

• About half of Bandcamp’s staff were laid off
• Marc Andreessen ran his mouth about all the things he’s made money from but ddidn’t say whether any of it was useful
• Francis Maude got a re-up on civil service reform (without calling them ‘the blob’ like Cummings)

The Bandcamp story was hugely popular on my Twitter, both the chronological ‘Following’ and algorithmic ‘For you’ feeds. That suggests that’s where all the electronic music people are sticking around.

The techno-populist screed from Marc Andreessen was blazing through Mastodon, particularly as he said that tech ethics, eco-conscious sustainability and trust & safety boards were getting in the way of progress. This is where the more technical people hang out. Lots of the web design and design systems crowd there, the IndieWeb folk, the privacy people.

The civil service reform piece went off on Bluesky. That seems to be where the public sector digital folk are migrating. There have been a flurry of new sign-ups over the last couple of weeks. (I couldn’t give away invite codes a while back but, if you want one, drop me a line.)

I guess I’m probably going to keep looking at Twitter but I dount I’ll post there much, unless it’s about music. Mastodon has been where I feel a bit more at home, so I’m spending more time there. And Bluesky is OK but it was dead for a while. But now I’m thinking it’s probably a more social extension of LinkedIn, just without all the talk about doing ordinary things in extraordinary ways.

Anyway, do with that information what you will.