History Walks Venice will no longer post content or updates on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Those sites have become toxic and useless.
In the future, posts and articles from this site will be shared on Mastodon and Bluesky.
The even more ancient methods of following a website, by using RSS feeds or subscribing to the newsletter Venetian Stories are also available.
Social media is dead
The social media scene has changed a lot in the last years, both with an increased commercialisation of the sites, and increased, and often extreme, politicization.
Social media was once about staying in touch with those you knew, and getting to know new people, but that is practically impossible now.
Twitter has become an extremist site after Elon Musk’s take-over. It is now a rather unpleasant place, a bit like a bar full of drunken Nazis, and even if they don’t come over to your corner, they still dominate the atmosphere.
A large part of profiles on the site are automated bots, which will just waste your time if you try to ‘engage.’
Furthermore, what one puts on Twitter, isn’t actually shown to anybody, unless you pay. I have a private Twitter profile with 4.5k followers. Any single tweet receives on average less than 50 visualisations. Not engagements as likes and retweets, but visualisations.
Any effort is wasted if your posts are shown to just 1% of your followers. For a profile like History Walks Venice, it is not even worth the time to just copy-paste a post from somewhere else.
This means that to get anything out of Twitter, you need to finance the extreme politics of the owner of the site.
I won’t do that.
Facebook has the same issues of no longer showing your posts to anybody, unless you pay to have them boosted individually. This has been going on for years, and in fact, whatever I share there receives no engagements whatsoever.
The original purpose of Facebook, keeping up with what friends were doing, is now submerged in a sea of suggested and sponsored posts.
AI — automated copyright infringement
Then we have the AI debacle.
Facebook is preparing a deluge of AI-generated material for everybody’s feeds, which will drown out everything else.
On top of this, both Twitter and Facebook will use whatever we post to feed their AI-models. They will use what we put on theirs sites, to produce vast amounts of copycat material (which is what AI is capable of) to throw at people just to get them to hang around a bit more.
When using these sites, you don’t know who’s a real human being and who’s a computer program, and you can’t know if a picture a video is real or artificial.
Real and fake, true or false, become meaningless dichotomies.
Both sites are moving towards being cheap superficial entertainment, rather than actual humans sharing information.
The remainder
The hold-outs are, as I see it, the Fediverse (Mastodon et al.) and Bluesky.
The Fediverse is not one site, but many sites which are ‘federated’ through a standard protocol called ActivityPub. However, just like email can work across domains and servers, so can ActivityPub. A user on one site can comment on a post on another, and users on still other servers can see it all.
Consequently, the Fediverse doesn’t belong to anybody and cannot be controlled by any individual or company. Anybody can participate.
The distributed nature of the network means that there is no single place to see all the posts, and there is no unified search function. It is therefore a bit more difficult to find your way around, compared to the systems where everything is in one place, like Twitter and Facebook.
This site is federated. It participates in the Fediverse.
It is possible to follow it from any server in the Fediverse. Every post on this site exists directly in the Fediverse, and if somebody comments on a post from this site elsewhere, the comment will show up here too.
The Fediverse handle of the site is @info.
Bluesky is a new social network, a bit like twitter in the early years, and it still has a nice atmosphere. It is, however, one company propped up by venture capital, so it might or might not end like the other social media sites. One day, somebody will want a return on their investment.
The Bluesky handle for this site is @historywalksvenice.com.
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