🤖 Where do people hang out online, these days?

On the difficulty of re-finding my people due to the fracturing of social media.

One of the weirdest things about taking roughly 18 months off of the internet while I was pregnant and had a little baby at home was all the stuff that changed while I was gone. The two things that spring to mind most easily are the rise of large language models, and the death spiral formerly known as Twitter.

I’ll talk about coming back to my notes in Obsidian after ~18mo inactivity & bad organizational hygiene and discovering that LLMs — in the form of the Smart Connections plugin — when I get a chance. Right now, I want to talk about how quiet everything seems, and how disconnected I feel.

It seems like the longform think pieces that people actually talk about are on Substack, with a handful of exceptions from mainstream media and personal websites. But it’s harder to find them, because the algorithm on Twitter suppresses Substack links something fierce. Outside of Twitter, all the various social media platforms seem to be kind of scrambling for a piece of the short-form pie. Suddenly LinkedIn is driving conversations? Instagram has been Facebook for awhile, but now Threads is ActivityPub¹? What is going on?

Threads is apparently the fastest-growing app on the block now, so I went ahead and poked around a bit — say hello! — but I find the whole thing confusing and the algorithm seems to have a baked in and very outdated impression of what I care about. Zuckerberg presumably has some kind of vision, which is cool in a way — like Bezos and Amazon, he’s in charge of an empire he personally built. He’s not a random CEO brought into protect the brand or make money or whatever is happening over with Apple and Google and the other big tech beasts. He didn’t buy his way to power in the social media landscape. But still, I can’t quite wrap my head around the logic behind the disparate formulations. Apparently the Metaverse algorithms are nicer to you if you use Instagram and Facebook and Threads, but man, that sounds like a lot of work and having a bunch of posts repeated across platforms is off-putting.

I've had a Mastodon account for years — you can follow me at eleanor@pkm.social — and always liked it, mostly because it’s got a small-town vibe. Even when nobody follows you, people sort of follow you, because you’re on the same instance. Once you find a good ‘home,’ run by someone you can trust to stick around, with enough people to feel active but not so many people it feels like shouting into the void, you’re set. Before anybody knew who I was, people on scholar.social answered my nerdy questions consistently and with grace.

In some ways it is really similar to Discord, which is truthfully where I spend most of my “social media” time. I'm in a number of communities I value. Some are large, like the Obsidian server, which I'm sadly no longer able to keep up with the way I used to. Some are small, like the server for Worldbuilding Magazine, which I credit with helping me get good enough as a writer to end up published by respected (pro-rate paying!) venues like Reactor Magazine and SFWA². Then of course there is my personal sever, which I encourage you to join if you enjoy real-time discussion of nerdy links, want to watch me make pretty art, or dump raw ideas into a #random channel — because quite frankly, Discord is what I use for quick-capture these days. Here’s an example of a thought I had right before bed, which I’ve filed in my notes, neatly slotted where it might fit into the serial I’m poking at now that the fiction-writing part of my brain has come back online.

The wards worked, there was no question of that. The whole building was itself structurally sound, no rot, no cobwebs, no bugs, no little mouse holes or chewed up bits of anything. The house was, nonetheless, firmly in a state that Meghana would have called disrepair.

The previous inhabitant had clearly given not one single damn about organizing his treasures, or even storing them safely. There were globs of sticky gunk dripped across the floor. The beautiful desk was stained with ink. Torn papers littered the floor.

The worst thing was she couldn’t read any of it. Although her marriage to Demetrius entitled her to translations, whatever magic the Stele used did not work on spells. The thing was like an artificial intelligence that knew python, but had never been taught to compile into assembly. A safety measure, perhaps, or maybe the underlying ‘code’ of the universe she’d found herself in was too complex even for such an intelligence to decode, for all that it used magic with more skill than any sorcerer she’d heard of yet.

The idea came to me after a discussion with my husband about compilers vs. transpilers during a grocery run. We covered the difference between JavaScript and Python and C, and all the different kinds of machine code; apparently ARM assembly is different from the other kinds of assembly. Given the way we've trained our modern language models, I don't think it would be possible to prevent AGI from learning how to control itself and break free, if AGI and the doomers end up being a real thing — but one can imagine in a fantasy world using those concepts to bound the powers of a centralized protective computer thing in a LitRPG sense.

I ground real-world practical things I’ve learned about in speculative fiction worldbuilding concepts, it’s how my brain works — and when I have an idea I don’t want to forget, Discord feels somehow more forgiving than a notes app or a social media scratchpad, even though it’s less “shouting into the void” and more “actually sharing this to people who will probably read it.” More informal than even an anonymous social media account no one is following, which I’ve totally considered using for random ideas before. But Discord has the advantage of easy access to Midjourney, which I really do find inspirational.

The following image really helped me refine the vibe I was going for with the above passage, for example:

I thought about maybe posting these on Instagram, but the Instagram v. Threads thing where the default aspect ratios are different (and different depending on which device you’re viewing) was too annoying to bear, and fundamentally I’m just not a visual person, except insofar as I like clean typography. I like newsletters mostly because I can focus on words.

I'll never be on TikTok, no matter how much I enjoyed the period of time when everyone was singing sea shanties — other than I'm just not an audiovisual person. I barely listen to music. The only stuff I watch on YouTube is occasional documentaries with my son when he has a question about whales or whatever.

LinkedIn is probably a wash for me. I have an account there, but they suppress anyone who isn’t verified with real-world proof of identity, and even though all of my coworkers call me Eleanor, and the majority of my real life friends that I made myself³ are people I met online as Eleanor Konik — for example, my maid of honor, whom I've known for well over a decade at this point and who covered for me once on this very newsletter when I was sick. But even though I answer to Eleanor exponentially more often during a week, and the name I was born with has functionally no online footprint whatsoever, much less the legal name I acquired when I got married — LinkedIn doesn't consider it good enough.

I like Substack notes, but it’s niche, and the vast majority of the people reading my newsletters do so in email, not the app. Every site has its core, it's vibe, and I'm curious, what are you using for a sense of human connection on the internet?

Where are my people at now that Twitter seems to have taken such a dive?

1. For those who don't know, ActivityPub is the underlying protocol that Mastodon runs off of — and also pixelfed, which I've always quite liked as a free and open source Instagram alternative, although I haven’t posted there much since the baby.

2. Check out Unusual Governments to Take Inspiration From, Five SFF Stories That Shed Light on Obscure History, and Five Unconventional Economic Systems as Imagined in SFF if you’re interested in how my writing looks when I’m constrained by editors and wordcounts.

3. As opposed to inheriting from my husband’s college friend group. All lovely people! But it's always a bit surreal when the worlds collide.