Things That Matter Most

Things That Matter Most

Mastodon: Social Media Made Social

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March 23, 2008 was the day my friend Sean introduced me to Twitter. It was a foreign concept to me. A website that would forward text messages from you to a group of friends – and forward any messages they sent back to you.

I was hooked. Sean had called the system “crack” and, honestly, it was addictive. I didn’t have a smart phone (or a reliable laptop), so getting content via text message was brilliant! I started following more and more people and, eventually, exhausted my limited capacity to pay attention to anything.

Early Twitter was revolutionary. It helped connect me to people I barely knew and tied me in to the communities I cared about most. Twitter was how I got started in the open source community. It’s how I learned about and interacted with WordPress. It’s how I built my blog. How I started making a name for myself in the world.

Sadly, Twitter today is not the thing that early Twitter was. It’s grown up, and I don’t like the thing it’s grown up to be.

Twitter Today

I follow less than 300 people on Twitter as a rule. It keeps my timeline manageable, and it forces me to carefully curate the content I consume. Despite that, Twitter (the company) has found a way to corrupt that stream of content. It’s disgusting.

I use “likes” to bookmark content for later consumption, research, or reply. Many of my friends do this, too. The thing is, Twitter started using “likes” as a form of passive promotion – and feeding content liked by my peers into my feed as if it had been explicitly promoted by them. 1

Twitter today fills my feed with ads – most of which are flagged as “promoted” content. Some of which are not flagged in any way. The other day, I noticed advertisements for Accenture Security in my timeline, all retweeted by “null.” Attempts to suss out the identity of “null” failed, as the Twitter API merely told me “usernames are unavailable.”

I later found out that “null” was Accenture Security itself! A few days later, I saw other content “shadow promoted” in my feed; content retweeted by accounts I do not follow was showing up in my feed along with content I wanted. This is … problematic at best. Nefarious at worst.

Most likely nefarious.

Then there’s the fact that Twitter the company “owns” the platform. They control the content that does or does not appear. They conduct shadow bans of users. They lock users’ accounts with or without reason. 2 They refuse to lock other accounts, then publicly defend their non-action despite evidence.

I joined Twitter because it connected me to the communities I care about. I’m now leaving Twitter because it’s actively worked to damage those communities.

Introducing Mastodon

Some time ago, the tech community started moving towards Mastodon – a federated social network with a similar interface and use case to Twitter. Unlike Twitter, however, it’s not controlled by a single entity.

Every Mastodon community is a unique installation of the software on some server or servers managed by that community. Individual users belong to one or another community and interact with other users on that same site – exactly like Twitter.

Unlike Twitter, these disparate Mastodon installations can all communicate with one another. A user on mastodon.technology can follow a user on mastodon.social from any other community. The servers handle transferring and copying content from one installation to another. All you need to keep track of is your own account and the list of users you follow.

Again, unlike Twitter, no one company or individual is in charge of when, how, or why accounts are locked or purged. It’s a community effort. And, because it’s a community effort, for-profit companies can’t inject themselves into the workflow with ad buys or any of the aforementioned potentially-nefarious activity I’ve seen on Twitter.

I explained it to a friend using the WordPress community as an illustration:

Twitter is to WordPress.com as Mastodon is to WordPress.org

One is a monolith run by a single, for-profit company. The other is a piece of software created and powered by the community that allows individuals to democratize the otherwise monolithic system.

I run my blog on WordPress to own my own content and avoid answering to anyone else. As of this week, I run my own Mastodon instance so I can own my own social network and avoid the malicious interference of corporations with their own interests.

My instance runs on AWS and has closed registration to prevent abuse. It’s invite-only at the moment and is home to a few of my close, personal friends. If you want to join, drop me a line and we’ll talk about it. Server costs are shouldered by the entire community, and we operate on a rule of personal respect. Oh, and no Nazis.

What Comes Next

My Twitter account will stay around. For a while.

I won’t be actively using it much as I’m trying incredibly hard to force myself to cut the “crack” Sean introduced me to out of my life. I will interact with these communities primarily through Mastodon.

If you DM me or @-message me on Twitter, I’ll see it. It just might take me a few days (or weeks) to respond. If you contact me through Mastodon I’ll be as responsive as I used to be. Remember, it’s becoming my primary tool.

Blog posts will still auto-publish tweets for now. I might still cross-post meaningful content at intervals. But, come 2019, I will archive and remove my Twitter account.

Said another way, I will be removing my Twitter account on December 31, 2018. All new content and interactions will take place on Mastodon.

I invite you to join me!

There are a lot of Mastodon communities out there. Find one that fits you and join the conversation. Together, we can own our content. Together, we can have engaging conversations. Together, we can build a network like Twitter used to be. Like Twitter should have been. The network and community we deserve.

I’m on Mastodon. Are you?

Notes:

  1. I know it’s fed my content into others’ feeds as well. I once “liked” a racist tweet by a former colleague so I could draft a cohesive response later … someone took my action to be agreement and endorsement of their position. My mistake using the tool in such a way. Twitter’s mistake in conflating my bookmarking of content with endorsement. ↩
  2. I’ve had my account locked once in the past year for no reason whatsoever. Twitter claimed I’d violated a rule, but refused to clarify which rule or how I violated it. ↩

Twitter in Decline

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I'm usually behind the times when it comes to adopting new technology. I've never owned an iPhone. I didn't have a gaming system until Halo 2 came out. I didn't own Bitcoin (or even a fraction thereof) until the buzz had truly gotten started.

But I am proud to say I was an early adopter of Twitter.

I joined in early 2008 on the invitation of a friend who, ecstatically sent me a "welcome to crack!" tweet as my very first message. The new platform was addictive and, as I didn't have a smartphone and received all updates as actual text messages, incredibly intrusive in my life.

Over time, my interest in the platform evolved from a quick way to broadcast notes to friends to a real-time collaboration tool with people I'd never met. I credit Twitter with helping me to get started in open source development; it served as a rapid networking tool amongst our community.

Real-Time News

The 2011 earthquake in Japan was one of the first times I personally experienced the use of Twitter as a real-time, unfiltered source of news. Thanks to friends and colleagues living in the island nation, I learned about the event hours before anything had surfaced on CNN.

Twitter was a great way for me to keep track of my friends and tap in to a constant stream of information without waiting for mainstream media to catch up. It was glorious!

I also met with a few other developers who were using Twitters' firehose API to scan for various events on the network before they were reported. Tracking the overall sentiment of the content of tweets over time helped pinpoint certain world events before they'd tripped the sensors of larger media bodies.

What was once a quick group messaging platform became an efficient, real-time news gateway!

The Wane of Twitter

Current Twitter, however, is losing on both fronts. I follow less than 300 people, but am followed by over 2,000. The idea of using Twitter as a way to broadcast to a small group of people is laughable. Twitter is a megaphone, not a group chat.

Likewise, the "real-time" nature of the platform has been destroyed by those seeking to better monetize and game the idea of "timeless content." Yesterday, while perusing my feed, I noticed #pdxtraffic called out as a trending topic.

Twitter Trends for Tuesday, Jan 2nd in Portland, OR.

Traffic in my area only trends on Twitter when there are major accidents on the freeway. We've had semi trucks turn over, farming equipment become wedged under overpasses, and protests block lanes of traffic during rush hour. Seeing this hashtag on the "real-time" network that Twitter purports to be was disconcerting.

So, too, were the first messages I saw when drilling into the tag:

Actual Tweets from the #pdxtraffic Twitter feed. On January 2nd.

Except … all of the "top tweets" in the feed were for traffic alerts from last week. There were no major incidents. There was no traffic to speak of at all – my ~45 minute commute took less than 20 minutes! Even the "latest" tweets in the feed were several days old and irrelevant to my commute.

Add this lack of timeliness with the fact that "likes" on Twitter are now used to serve content the same way as "retweets" and the stream of content the platform used to be is gone. The Twitter I joined died out ages ago for a more powerful media platform. Unfortunately, that new media platform has now also died out for … who knows.

Twitter itself was groundbreaking. But now the ground that Twitter stands upon can use some breaking of its own.

Be Yourself

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I’ve seen an interesting phenomena take place over the past few months. There are several people I follow online and I’ve seen many of them begin to back away from the public personas that made them reputable in the first place.

It’s not that they’ve changed. It’s not that they’ve taken on new personas. It’s that they’ve reached a position in the community where the cost of a misstep is compounded by their fame.

I’ve seen individuals previously known for their outgoingness not publish something controversial out of the fear of a public backlash. I’ve seen others create secondary publication channels – less visible sites on Tumblr, for example – rather than put a potentially inflammatory statement on their more public, primary channel.

I’ve seen people make a statement, then immediately back away and recant because they can’t put up with the negative publicity of that statement.

Don’t Be Fake

The problem with all of these scenarios is that you’re abandoning your true self. You’re selling out for popularity, fame, and a high Klout score.

You’re stepping away from the characteristics that define you and instead allowing yourself to be defined by the demagogical ebbs and flows of the community around you.

You’re betraying your brand.

Be Yourself

So long as you’re consistent, there is absolutely no danger in being yourself online. The personality and character that has carried you this far will continue to carry you in the future.

That said, increased visibility will lead to an increase in the volume of negative feedback. You ignored this feedback when you started out; don’t start listening to it now.

This past weekend, I saw a plethora of tweets take off – about race. Some were more politically charged than others. Some were more emotional than others. Every single one triggered some kind of response.

After re-tweeting a particular message, for example, a random follower of Chris Lema threatened to unfollow him in retaliation. Chris’ response was wonderful:

It was wonderful because Chris is the kind of person who is true to his character and identity. He’s not going to be defined by the following/unfollowing of individuals in his personal tribe. Chris has a brand, he understands his brand, and his messaging is always on target.

The moral of the story: be yourself at all times. Understand who you are and what you stand for. It won’t always be popular, but so long as you’re consistent to your internal identity, I’m confident you’ll come out just fine.

Editorial Calendars and Unintentional Spam

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The publishing world has no want for analogies to describe various distribution media. Two of the best, though, apply to Twitter and blogs.

Real-time Media

Twitter is a very real-time publication stream. You carefully craft a story or message and drop it into a river of ever-flowing content to be consumed by others.

It’s akin to sticking your head out the window of a moving car and yelling your message at bystanders on the sidewalk. The only people who ever know you said something are those who happened to be standing on that particular street at that particular time.

Yes, your followers (those who would frequent your street) can rewind things and see what you said before they got up that morning. Unfortunately that becomes a nearly impossible task as individuals’ list of accounts to follow continues to grow.

If your message is important, you might make a go of repeating it over and over again, hoping to catch a new crowd of followers each time. 1

Unfortunately, this also leads to a phenomenon known as Twitterspam. If you follow certain accounts long enough, you’ll see their postings consist mostly of links to off-site content and no real interaction with the rest of the community. It dilutes your ability to convey messages effectively as the people you want listening are less likely to pay attention to a spammer.

Long-form Content

Blogging is more akin to writing prose and placing it into a time capsule. On the one hand, most sites receive a major influx of content when a new post goes live. This could be because they promote the new content on Twitter or through other social media. It could be due to RSS readers acknowledging the new content.

Frankly, it doesn’t matter. The real value in a blog is that content never disappears. Every word written is available essentially forever, and the cost involved with pulling that content back to the forefront is minimal. Unlike a realtime stream (Twitter), blogs provide a way to consistently access evergreen, long-form writing.

Unlike streams of information, blogs are a great way to collect a wealth of knowledge that might prove useful in the future. That said, too frequently referencing articles from your own site could be perceived as a form of Blogspam.

Like its Twitter-relative above, blogspam can be just as damaging to your ability to reach a target audience.

With both in mind, how can you best leverage a consistent publication calendar without also alienating your target audience?

Notes:

  1. There are even software solutions that help schedule messages to achieve exactly this end. ↩

A Month Without Twitter

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In college, I subscribed to and read the New York Times every day during breakfast. It held some great writing, and the political opinion pieces were usually riveting and made for great table talk with other political science majors.

It was in college, though, that the world began to shift to the always-on digital news stream we all know and love today. I was one of the first to join Facebook, and a couple of years later used my fancy feature phone to sign up for Twitter via SMS. 1 The world was changing rapidly, and these changes meant far more than the end of my hard-copy newspaper subscription.

Today, I don’t read any one newspaper. I don’t subscribe to news media that comes in the mail or is dropped at my doorstep.

I read Twitter.

It’s through Twitter that I learned of the earthquake in Japan – before it was reported on CNN. It’s through Twitter that I learned the results of the last election – before anything was reported in the news. It’s through Twitter that I learned about Ferguson – before anyone mentioned the city on the evening reports.

Going without Twitter for a month has mean I’ve missed quite a bit, both in terms of industry buzz and real-world events. Having to wait for the nightly news or listen to the morning radio reports and rely on Feedly for updates has severely limited the amount of content consumption of which I’ve been capable over the past 31 days.

It also means I’ve been much more productive without the constant distraction of an always-on data stream. But, in hindsight, I think I’ll happily sacrifice the tiny bit of productivity I lose with Twitter updates in the right corner of my screen if I can reap:

  • More frequent updates about current events
  • Instant access to other developers in the community
  • A way to interact with others, across the globe, in real time without having to establish such a channel in the first place

Going without Twitter has taught me how valuable real-world relationships can be and the incredible benefits of being “right here” where I am instead of plugged in to a phone. It’s also helped show me the value such a highly-connected medium brings to our always on-the-go and distributed lifestyle.

Notes:

  1. We all referred to Twitter as “Phone Crack” at the time due to its heavily addictive nature. If only we knew … ↩

Advertising Experiments

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I don’t sell advertising on this site, but I’m not above advertising this site elsewhere. To that end, I took the time to run a quick experiment using Twitter’s new “Sponsored Tweets” functionality.

I’m less than impressed with the results.

The Campaign

I wrote an article yesterday that I wanted to drive some additional traffic towards. Since most of my traffic comes from Twitter, and the demographic that frequents Twitter is also one that tends to be interested in my topic of choice, I figured Sponsored Tweets would be an interesting way to attract that traffic.

I built the campaign around a Tweet I’d made earlier in the day:

Since the article was about net neutrality, I configured the campaign to target people similar to followers of @Comcast and @GoogleFiber.

I further refined the target to users interested in computer networking, network security, open source, and tech news. They had to speak English. 1 I also targeted users in the United States. 2

This presented me with a potential audience of 2 million Twitter users.

I set a reasonable budget for the campaign (no more than $50 per day), but was completely shocked by the suggested bid for sponsoring a Tweet – Twitter suggested $1.50-$2.50 per engagement for my ad.

This seemed a bit ridiculous, but I bit because I wanted to test the platform.

The Results

The traffic impact on my site during yesterday’s experiment was … minimal.

The campaign created a total of 4,809 “impressions” of my ad – the number of time my sponsored Tweet appeared in others’ timelines. Unfortunately, those impressions only resulted in 45 total “engagements” with my content.

An engagement is:

  • A link click (44)
  • A re-tweet
  • A reply
  • A new follower (1)

With only 45 engagements, my conversion rate was only 0.94%. Consider a 1% conversion is considered “good” by many, this seems to be a quality campaign. Except for a couple of tiny details:

My blog averages 10 times this amount of traffic. Over the same time period. For free. 3

I also forgot that, like me, many people in my target demographic also hate ads.

Consider this, I paid more than some pay in a month for hosting, to gain fewer visitors than I gain in a day for free, and accidentally alienated influential members of my target demographic in the process.

I won’t be using Sponsored Tweets any time soon …

Notes:

  1. This wasn’t my requirement, I wanted a much more general filter but Twitter required me to pick a language. Since the article was in English, I went with English. ↩
  2. Again, not my choice – Twitter required me to pick a region. ↩
  3. I paid a total of $30.56 for my 45 visitors. That’s $0.68 each … I’ll stick with the free traffic. ↩