The jerk store called
If we have to migrate to non-Twitter spaces, we need to resist the urge to police people's choices—about whether to stay, or where they land.
We've reached the stage of the Twitter migration where people are using their new spaces to get snippy about other new spaces. Lovely.
In building up my Mastodon network, I’ve noticed it’s mostly become people I knew on Twitter as we found each other in the new space. Not an uncommon phenomenon; to have a social feed, you need to follow people, and there’s always some trouble that comes with being one of the first to arrive at the party.
But I’ve noticed a shift in tone the past week among those I follow there. Something like 10% of my Mastodon feed this week is posts and conversation dumping on people for staying on Twitter, or for joining alternatives such as Hive or Post. The underlying argument about staying on The Bird is what you’d expect (“What, you LIKE being on a toxic space with Nazis?”). The argument against the alternatives is mostly about how people are blindly jumping into centralized platforms run by unaccountable founders, replicating the problem that made them leave Twitter in the first place.
A few representative examples, which are by no means exhaustive:
I know and like many of the people in these conversations. I removed identity from the posts because it’s not really about the person saying it in these three instances, and making it about the people only serves to obscure that fact. But the sentiment is a pervasive stance among a lot of scholarly-minded people who have done good work in this space, and it’s popping up a lot on journalism/tech/academic Mastodon in particular.
The criticisms above mostly target the newly launched Post (I’m on there, and you can sign up for the waitlist here; I plan to write more once I get a feel for it), Hive Social, moving your output to Substack, or using LinkedIn, among others. “Kara” in that second post above is referring to Kara Swisher, one of the smartest tech journalists in the biz who is an adviser to the project and has been talking it up on her podcast. The common thread in these arguments is you don’t own anything in those spaces, and you should instead join fediverse-based options that offer more ownership and control options.
There is a lot of value in creating and owning. I've written about that before and I very much understand the argument. I even think that in the long view, it needs to be our goal. But I’m here to offer a counterweight perspective to that view, correct as it might be. It’s the kind of view you take when you think like a creator wanting to make their work visible, and one who doesn’t have a lot of runway to build out an alternative.
For better or worse, the easiest place to join if you’re fleeing Twitter is the one with the easiest learning curve and the most people. Those things often are related but sometimes you’re trying to balance that when they’re not. The point is you need an audience, and you need a place that’s usable enough to attract one.
Mastodon is hard at first. There’s a learning curve, and there’s some necessary time spent grasping what it is before you can figure out how to use it well. It can also feel a little insular at first, which isn’t a lot of help for people who need visibility for themselves and their work. It is not obvious why you need to join a server at signup, and it’s such a momentous-feeling choice that many walk away.
The point here is we have to acknowledge there’s a privilege that comes with having the time to ride the learning curve, and there’s privilege that comes with having the technical or abstract knowledge necessary to level up quickly in a place like Mastodon. Many don't have the technical skills to build that thing you think is easy. Others have a hard time grasping what you find facile.
You can’t blame people whose immediate livelihood depends on it for taking the centralized path that has a familiar interface and lots of people you know, and you certainly shouldn’t take a condescending, shaming tone with them. Platforms with learning curves are always going to be niche until they get easier to use. Love your Mastodon experience, by all means, but have some empathy for people in different situations.
For creators, the stakes are high and you go where the masses are instead of sitting in a silo. You have to go, in some cases, because sometimes that’s where your work reaches people you want to reach.
We get it, Sherlock: owning your space is ideal. But it's not always practical for some. What I’m too often seeing among influential people in the tech journalism space instead is this rigid, black-and-white, all-or-nothing subculture springing up among a concentration of people who are leaving Twitter. I don't think it's particularly healthy. It's condescending for one, it's ironically not welcoming to people for another. It's turned me off to engaging on Mastodon a lot the past week because I just want to yell at them for using language that alienates the people they're trying to convert. Nobody is going to join the Talk Down To Me Club.
It's ok for spaces to serve different purposes for people, and to have feet in multiple camps. Millennials and GenZ got this one right, in retrospect. I saw this a lot in the classroom as we discussed social platform use in my classes, but it took me a while to really grasp the value they saw in diversifying. What they understood: having your feet across camps means no one platform or experience owns you. There is no sudden migration if you exist in lots of different spaces for different purposes
I haven’t left Twitter yet. I’m there while building out networks in other spaces I might have to flee to. But jumping from one to a singular alternative isn’t going to work, so I’m trying alternatives with different formats (text, images, video) as well as different architectures (decentralized or centralized options, I wrote here about those). I need niche spaces, places to engage with the public, places to distribute long-form writing, and places to collaborate. No one experience can own that. I am not alone in this sentiment, and the answer for me is diversification of platforms rather than centralizing an experience to a single space (whether it’s decentralized or not).
The road in front of many of us, then, is different spaces for different purposes. I believe this is a situation that is more common than not, and something people with some privilege should consider when levying their judgment.
Mastodon, the decentralized option, looks like a place for niche conversation in the long run. It doesn’t seem like a place for casual Twiter-like chat because there’s too many hurdles in onboarding and server administration to amass a huge conversation. Its learning difficulty and architecture are set up well for conversations around niche topics or interests.
Post (centralized) looks like a good place to talk about the news with non-journalists. It’s in soft-launch beta now, so we will see. It is very much built to capture the news sharing and discussion aspects of Twitter, but with a lot more emphasis on community moderation (and a bit of paying for news folded in; I do plan to write about this!).
Hive Social (centralized) seems built around things like social conversation, a piece of the conversational aspect of Twitter many of us love. Crucially, it also seems well designed for certain types of visual creators.
LinkedIn (centralized) is going to leverage its professional network advantage as Twitter flails. A lot of the professional promotion that people did on Twitter has a logical home there.
Email newsletters are a growth space for longform writers. Without time to put in sweat equity on your own webspace, you’re relying on a Substack-type service to manage your audience and send out posts. You own that data, but you’re still putting a lot of trust in companies to behave.
Let’s be real (or BeReal, #rimshot): every platform, centralized or decentralized, has tradeoffs whose calculus differs depending on your comfort with porting a whole network to a new space. And even then, it could be trouble. Mastodon is still a place where all your eggs are in one basket in the sense you are not diversified. If you get banned from a server, a server admin can delete your data and your network without recourse. You own your data if the server admin is kind enough to allow it. Let's not kid ourselves that you have full control there.
I posted a Substack post on a social space a couple of weeks back and within minutes got called out by a fellow media tech professor for not having my own blog (that they were using someone else’s social platform to raise that criticism was an irony lost on them). Yes, I could have a blog on a web space I own instead of a Substack. Genius idea I’d never thought of! Except we can’t do everything. Time spent managing my blog software and server, managing my audience, etc., is time not spent on other things. I choose instead to have some modicum of managing my audience and use that time to promote my work in spaces instead.
Tradeoffs.
What the hell are we even doing here? Instead of policing choices, we could instead assume that people know what they’re doing and are having to calibrate a lot of factors unique to them.
The real conundrum is on the users trying to evangelize for ownership and decentralization. If the tradeoffs don’t favor joining a place such as Mastodon but the setup of Mastodon is good in and of itself, isn’t the problem really that we aren’t making it easy enough for people to choose the supposed better alternative?
People use platforms for different needs, and they're smarter than people think about the tradeoffs critics are noting. There is no need to be smug about it. Mastodon has started to feel like an ivory tower in that regard.
Those criticizing people for joining a centralized space are mostly people with status. They have the technical know-how to succeed, and they know whom to ask if they need help. They have privilege, plain and simple. They are not voices too often left behind by traditional media structures, and they are not people who have to hustle for exposure and influence.
And they're almost always white dudes. If Mastodon doesn’t work out for them, they can flood Post or Hive or some other alternative and gain an instant following. Their influence and status are not in doubt, and they aren’t penalized for waiting to jump to a popular ship. From this corner, when it borders on sniping it feels like the real complaint is that people with status want their usual level of influence on a platform they choose, and that starts to sound like sour grapes when the audience chooses otherwise.
Creators can’t afford to think so narrowly and idealistically, and rather than criticize them we need to acknowledge their challenges and redouble our efforts to help them get networked-up in a particular space or setup if we genuinely believe it’s the best choice. That goes double for helping creators who are outsiders by definition, people who have to hustle for just a morsel of the status the chest-beaters often have.
The prospect of migration is hard for everyone. There probably are better alternatives than others, but criticizing people for choices they make in ignorance or out of their own unique practical concerns is condescending and unhelpful. A little bit of understanding and help is in order.
Jeremy Littau is an associate professor of journalism and communication at Lehigh University. Find him on Twitter, Mastodon, or Post.
Another good one Professor...question after reading this sounds like a perfect executive education course about how to migrate away from Twitter and take most of what you wrote here plus some additional materials and have a tutorial on it