It’s almost a year since I deactivated my Twitter account. Or should I call it X? Anyway, it doesn’t matter because I don’t use it any more. Over the past few weeks it seems quite a few more – especially in the UK – have had enough of the antics of Elon Musk (aka Space Karen), especially with his attempts to fan the flames of the recent Farage riots by spreading misinformation. The first thing I noticed was that my BlueSky account was suddenly getting quite a lot of new followers. I now have about 850, still a long way short of the over 7000 I used to have on Twitter, but the level of engagement is far higher. That’s because the algorithm Space Karen introduced on X makes it difficult for your own followers. let alone anyone else, to see your tweets. The one disadvantage of BlueSky is that it doesn’t have an API that allows me to post directly from this blog when I publish a post, so I have to copy the URL by hand.
I also have an account on Mastodon where I have over 1200 followers and similarly good engagement. When I first started there a couple of years ago it didn’t have a WordPress API but it does now, so everything I write here gets posted automatically on my feed. Not only that, this blog is now also now fully federated which means that there is an autonomous feed for the blog posts. Not just a link to each post, as the API produces, but the whole post. This is a nice feature because if I change a post on this WordPress platform it automatically gets changed on the Mastodon feed.
I also have a Facebook Page on which these
And now there’s Threads, which is like a version of Twitter bolted onto Instagram. When this first came out last year it wasn’t available in the EU for data protection issues so I didn’t bother with it. I only just found out at the weekend that has been available since December 2023 but I wasn’t paying much attention to social media then so didn’t catch the news. Anyway, since I already have a (very quiet) Instagram account so I set up a Threads account which you can find here if you like that sort of thing. My first impressions of Threads are not very favourable, but let’s see how it goes. At least it’s not as bad as Twitter. I still think it is indefensible that my employer, along with most other universities, has decided to maintain a presence on that site.
