(This post has been translated from the Spanish version with help of ChatGPT, of course it has been afterwards reviewed by me).

Social media has never been my thing, and once again, after the umpteenth attempt, I’m bored of it. The problem is that I don’t find them meaningful. They are a place where people resonate like waves, making irrelevant topics trend. Of course, trends are suggested to other users who join the phenomenon —driven by a basic instinct in which everyone wants to be part of something new and belong to something— increasing the level of diffusion about a certain topic.

Of course, all of this happens while you’re aware that algorithms govern what you’re shown at every moment in order to keep you on the platform, so that they can put ads in front of your eyes and make unimaginable sums of money thanks to your attention. What does the user get out of all of this? They get the possibility of interacting with others, keeping up with what’s happening regarding what interests them (and what the algorithm deems appropriate), dopamine and artificial happiness rushes, being part of something bigger, wasting time that they could be using to produce something instead of consuming, making the followed influencers richer. To me, the balance seems tilted, you decide which side 😉.

The clearest proof that people don’t use social media to stay up to date with the lives of their relatives, friends, or influencers, but instead do it for the sake of feeling part of something, is the recent differences between Twitter and Mastodon. If people only wanted to keep up with what’s happening with others, they’d use Mastodon, which provides exactly the same functionalities as Twitter, with the added value of eliminating all privacy, design, and Muskian villainy issues. However, this doesn’t happen, people still stay on Twitter, and those who switch to Mastodon post about how bad Twitter is and the latest thing Elon did. This obviously speaks to those who stay on Twitter and are only interested in having followers, for whatever reason (usually influence and economics), because leaving would mean losing many who wouldn’t have the skills to switch to another platform and continue following them there. Of those who migrate to Mastodon, the fact that 70% of what they post is resentment towards Twitter shows that they don’t use social media to share their experiences with relatives and friends, but to belong to the new, which is to show anger (make fun) against (of) Twitter.

Even another more confirming proof is that there are people migrating from Twitter to Bluesky and another one that Jack Dorsey is working on, whose name I don’t remember now. People obviously want to be part of something new, to belong to something, and if that something is exclusive, even better. No one wants a space to share themselves with the world, it’s very boring, it’s better to be a product and feel important.

To the point then… or finally

Despite all the complaints written before, time and time again the question arises of how to make my blog known to people, and time and time again the way of spreading it through social (businesses) media appears.

What I decided to do about two weeks ago was to open an account on Mastodon, one on Twitter, and another on Pixelfed. The idea was to post small posts with photos that I had taken and that I would take in the future. This way, I could share small things, without much depth or extension like a blog post.

The result was that on Twitter I didn’t log in more than twice, once to open it and the other to close it. On Pixelfed, I uploaded two photos to test it out and the next time I logged in was also to close it, although I have to say that there were very good photos there. Finally, on Mastodon, I was there the longest, accumulating about 14 posts and 10 followers.

With Mastodon, I felt good, because despite not finding something that interested me in the feeds, every thing that I posted, those ten people who followed me would see it for sure. For this reason, on several occasions, I promoted posts that I had made here on my blog, so that people would at least know of its existence and give it a chance. However, I think there is little engagement on Mastodon, as people don’t mark many posts as favorites (like) to go outside of Mastodon to read a post.

Experiment Results

Only one person came from Mastodon to this blog, and another from Pixelfed, and the average time they spent was about 10 seconds according to data reported by Umami. More people have arrived through theforest.link than social networks, although 10 followers is not something significant. Anyway, this led me to conclude that some people somehow arrived here but didn’t stay. The site has little appeal even though it seems beautiful to me. So what can be done to make them stay? Well, nothing, because I don’t do it for people to spend their day here. This blog is not a social business. It already helps me, if it serves someone else at some point, that would be perfect. In the mean time, just writing here for the void.