Note: The role of researchers and journalists in the current social media crisis

We are at a peak of the attention economy as well as the feed communication systems. Frustrated with Twitter, people are looking at the Fediverse (most famously Mastodon), Bluesky Social (a Twitter spin-off) and Threads (launched this week by Meta/Instagram) as alternatives. Writers and researchers should take a moment to reflect their role in this situation.

We have to be careful of how our emotions, thinking, networking and communication is affected by feed algorithms and who runs these services. At this moment, I will not join Bluesky or Threads because they are connected to a media economy that I seek distance from, but I want to use the current situation and share thoughts on the social media crisis:

In the current social media crisis and debates, for me it’s about 3 things:

1. #reclaimyourarchive, export it, archive it.
2. build your alternatives of open feeds
3. use your power to make the federated alternatives relevant as a decentralized digital public sphere.

1. It’s ironic to even call it “social” media by now, which sounds like it is about connecting and collaborating, and not about promotion. It is clear that they are not structured at all for this. After more than 10 years on web 2.0, my archive and data is in several of the commercial silos. Tumblr being the most relevant for me, because of its archive quality, reblogging and sorting with hashtags. Because of data-protection legislation, services have to offer various export functions. That way, I was able to reclaim my data luckily. Everyone should do this.

2. The idea of a global public sphere of tweets is seriously flawed. It’s doomscrolling bubbles, dopamine hits, spectacle. This crisis affects marginalized voices that need such digital publics where they can be heard. I know that social struggles rely on its use, but everyone should build a backup now, for example partner with hackers to run your own fediverse server.

3. Let’s seize the chance of making federated open platforms more important. There are barriers, and we need work on them. Researchers and journalists need to go to the open platforms and learn to use them, and support these voices that depend on digital publics, to support their independency from the commercial silos and their algorithms.