hedging my social media position

In the old days there was twitter. I had a twitter account, found some funny people to follow and would get the best customer service from companies twitter accounts.

Roll on a few years and I have twitter, mastodon and bluesky accounts. I like to keep things simple, so how the heck has this even happened?

Well, I think I am hedging my position. In my brain there will one day be a winner in the war to feed me adverts whilst I laugh at cat videos. Perhaps the winner will be the one that is free to use, although that really isn't a sustainable position. Getting people to put money into a perceived free activity such as browsing funny cat videos is seemingly impossible to achieve so adverts seem to be the revenue generator of choice. Bluesky is funded through venture capital, I wonder what their venture will be, subscriptions might work.

We don't really want a winner though do we? A single platform where the owning entity has too much power, able to sway opinion and control what we see, and therefore what we think?

We also want something that is easy to use and interact with, mastodon is a federated service that minimises the risk of a single entity owner, but needs work on the interface - try unfollowing a tag to see what I mean.

I could give up one or two accounts, but they aren't 'costing' me anything to run, although I feel a sense of obligation to them all. This is weird given I am missing out on 99.999999% of everything that is happening on the planet, if I have an account then the FOMO is strong. Perhaps I should take Laura Olin's advice.

Until the mythical winner of the social media wars is declared then follow me on all my accounts twitter, mastodon and bluesky and I'll follow you back on all yours - it will be one massive follow-fest.

update: I am going to use only mastodon for a while. I can't manage three social networks.