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The internet connects people across the world into a global village. Wasn't that what they used to say in its early days? It's still kind of true, with some necessary provisos. There's a great firewall and new digital Berlin walls are being constructed, there are gated communities and paywalls.
Here are some of my experiences, from the perspective of never having been active on anything usually considered a social media platform.
News has reached me that two major social media platforms are experiencing something of an exodus. As someone who never signed up for a facebook or twitter account, the news doesn't really concern me. Apparently there is a corresponding influx of new mastodon users at the moment. Although I actually signed up once at some mastodon instance, I very quickly realised that this was rubbish. (For me, that is; I understand and respect that others may find it useful.) It soon became clear that it catered to the same needs as twitter, only without advertising and surveillance capitalism, but still with many of the same flaws. At the time, a few years back, mastodon was still very small, which limited its usefulness as a channel for outreach. I never liked the idea of having to follow people in order to hopefully find something interesting to read, or putting hashish tags on certain marketable words in order to help readers find the posting. It was clear also from my extremely short séjour that engaging in a meaningful way would easily risk becomming an obsessive activity.
Forums of course come in many different shapes, sizes and forms, but their defining character being that they are all devoted to a subject, they attract users who want to discuss the same thing. The forums I have enjoyed probably come close to the ideal way social media might work, creating a closely-knit community of people who share knowledge and experiences. The organic sociality of a forum can be easily destroyed or threatened by the introduction of scoring systems, likes, shares, reputations, all those things that create an unnatural hierarchy as well as incentives to behave in certain ways for the wrong reasons. Forums that are dominated by quarrels and defenestrations are best avoided.
Pubnixes might label themselves as alternative social media, but from my limited experience I have the impression that they are more similar to forums because they tend to revolve around a specific (counter) culture and gather people with similar interests.
Google had their failed and discontinued experiment with circles, which I had a skeptical look at when it was introduced. Of course, I never saw the point. You could follow people and share things with them, as you could do anyway by uploading files on a web site for a general audience, or sending them by email for personal communication. They had a creepy recommendation system that suggested people "you might know" who were, more often than not, actual acquaintances. Obviously you couldn't find out how google knew. This was about a year before the Snowden revelations, which would raise public awareness about such snooping.
Shadow profiles were notoriously exploited by facebook. If I'd ever be forced to join facebook, let's say because my employer insisted that I take a course that required me to have an account, they would already know who most of my friends are, even ones I've forgotten that I once knew. They'd know exactly what kind of art and music I'm interested in, as well as my political leanings, civil status, and probably many other things I wouldn't even tell my psychoanalyst if I had one.
At times, LinkedIn has been more pushy, sending spam about folks who supposedly miss me over there (I've no idea if those emails are genuine). Even ResearchGate is annoyingly watchful of who "read" my four hundred page theses (meaning they downloaded it), and would prefer to keep track of everything career related. I don't expect much from them. Paywalled papers posted there tend to remain locked up, so what's the point?
Journalists and politicians have clinged to twitter. It is unfortunate, because their short breath speech bubbles cannot hold a nuanced argument. Moreover, quotations from tweets litter what would otherwise be readable articles. And that's only the external problems, not to mention the bullying, bot farms, assaults on free speech, and psyoptic manoeuvering. I'm not sure it matters a whole lot which one of the billionaires currently owns it, the platform's dysfunctionality will probably remain intact.
And here on gemini we have an "influx" of people who are accustomed to social media and the commercial web, causing gemlogs to be perceived as a slow form of communication. Often they are monologues, and if not, they take the form of letters. Before telephones and print newspapers people sent handwritten letters to colleagues over the continent. For a challenge, try posting a letter in a bottle and throw it in the water. I once did that, threw it in a small river through my hometown. After a few months I got a reply in the post from someone who had picked it up.
The average geminaut seems to be a programmer or a computer savvy person. There are technical barriers of entrance. I certainly don't expect everyone to be able to figure out how to set up their own instance or to find out what ssh is and how to use it. These hindrances mean that only people with a certain level of computer literacy will join. The community may remain relatively small and cohesive, which isn't such a bad thing, but it will also be filled with people with similar backgrounds and interests. It's no coincidence that there were plenty of terse capsules with one-liners about what hardware and operating system they ran on in the first years of Gemini, and little content apart from talk about technical solutions. Fortunately, that seems to have changed a bit.
As for the debates on social media, mastodon, and gemini gate keeping, here's some points of view:
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