In the second week of Elon Musk’s Twitter reign, things are going about as well as predicted: several senior US politicians are speaking publicly about their genitals, George W. Bush and Tony Blair are saying they miss the Iraq war, while Nintendo’s cute video game Mascot Mario shows the middle finger to the assembled world public. The audience owes all of this to Musk’s plan to be able to purchase user verification for eight dollars a month in the future. Many used this to have their sometimes parodic, sometimes malicious forgeries confirmed as originals.
The action on Twitter, combined with the announcement by Facebook’s parent company Meta that it would lay off more than 11,000 employees, has led some to conclude that the age of social media is, if not dead, at least dying . The only platform that is still growing is Tiktok. And it is less a social medium than a place of passive consumption. Mass medium rather than medium for the masses. Instagram, in its way of copying every feature imaginable from Tiktok, is well on its way there.
With the alternative Mastodon, the servers are not sufficient
What now? Is the Long-Ignored Mastodon Decentralized Network the Solution? Should you start a new life there? There is talk of migration, of exile, even of a mass exodus. There are new widgets like Debirdify or Twitodon to help users find the people they follow in this cluttered new world. Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko has counted almost 500,000 new accounts since the end of October. Given Twitter’s daily active user base — an estimated 206 million people — that’s not exactly a huge migration. Nevertheless, the network is already groaning under the “rush”, the servers are not enough, the apps are going crazy.
Whether or not Mastodon is a viable alternative, instead of simply replicating the bad habits you’ve learned in a new place, you could use the opportunity and the moment to redefine the term “social media.” Would it really be that bad to talk less, less often, and with fewer people? But because they are far too busy panting their well-being out of their bodies in this hamster wheel, most users don’t even get around to asking what a social network could even be.
What would it look like if, in future digital spaces, concepts such as community, privacy and mutual care were the focus instead of profit indicators? Would the quality of information on these networks improve if it took a little more effort to post? When people admit, albeit painfully, that they don’t have something to say all the time, doesn’t every mediocre idea have to be appreciated by a potential audience of millions? And what if the communities in these hypothetical networks created their own spaces that are no longer defined by, for, and by advertisers?
Such a place does not exist in the almost infinite Internet. Perhaps a new alternative will soon fill the perceived vacuum. But even if change were possible, writes the magazine TheAtlanticit would be difficult to accomplish because “life has been adjusted to the joys and anguish of social media. It seems as hard to break the habit of social media as it was for 20th-century Americans to break the habit.” to quit smoking”.