Social Platforms, Ownership, and the Open Web

Bob: Hey David, how are you doing today?

David: Hi Bob. Thank you for having me on. What is this? WooBits?

Bob: This is called WooBits. Yeah. I’m doing a bit of a take on it. It used to be me droning on for 10 or 15 minutes and I thought it’d be more fun to have somebody come on as a co-host and then we could both drone on at least it wouldn’t just be my voice.

David: Oh, I’m sorry. Oh man. Me being the first one may not be the greatest test of that. I swore I ordered some WooBits as an appetizer for Applebee’s last week, but I just wanted to be sure when I promote this later I’m using the right terminology. So WooBits, yes. But thank you for having me on. Greatly appreciate it.

Bob: This is very cool. So this is our debut and we’re going to talk, as I described before about social media, the pit of social media. But before we get into the pit of social media, why don’t you just do a quick intro because there may be one or two people out there that don’t know who you are, but just in case.

David: They’re called lucky people. So yeah, my name is David Bisset. I’ve been with WordPress, which is probably the audience that’s going to hear this, but I’ve been doing PHP and WordPress for 15, almost 20 years now, more or less since almost a couple of years just after WordPress started. I’ve done a lot of freelance, I’m a developer, build a lot of plug-ins and themes and all of that stuff throughout my history. Currently I am project manager at a project or a company called WPCharitable, which was recently acquired by Awesome Motive. So that’s where I am right now.

Bob: Cool.

David: I’m sure when we get into the social media stuff, if you dare to even figure out where I am, you’re going to find out soon where that’s going to be.

Bob: Yeah, really. Alrighty. So let’s start with the state of the bird. Yeah, it’s…

David: Somebody give me the bird.

Bob: Yeah, really we’re going to give it to everyone. So the bird, where are you at with the bird right now, yourself? Where’s your mindset and how you’re trying to play out in that?

David: The bird was the word. Anyway, well, let me give you a little bit of back history here and somebody just rolled their eyes when they’re listening to this. I’ll make it quick. When I started Twitter, I think it was in 2016, I can’t remember, my app will tell me in a second. I was trying to see who was out there and I really wasn’t that social in the beginning. And a couple of things, I think I was trying a WordPress meetup or something. It was, ooh, it says here I joined member since February, 2008. I was further back than I thought. So in 2008, I joined it because I really was freelancing alone and I really didn’t have anywhere else to go. 2008 is pretty much when Work Camp Miami was starting up.

So I haven’t been to probably any work camps at all or any conferences like that for that matter. So I was reaching out. I quickly learned that instead of, I was using, if you remember delicious websites and you were able to keep track of links and your browser and all that, I would put bookmarks into my blog, but I found that I use Twitter as primarily as a I found this cool thing and I thought it might be useful later storage system. And what was great about that is that if others could benefit from that or add comment to those links, that’s how I got a lot of my initial early networking. Introductions were easier when I went to work camp saying, oh, this was useful. I did blog it off and on. I’ve never been a long-term blogger simply because I don’t write well.

I don’t feel comfortable writing unless I can rant. And these days if I blog half the time I am dictating it into my phone and then I edit it later. So it doesn’t come naturally to me. But short things, links after I got done with Delicious, I threw it into Twitter and tweeting things was how I learned and how I shared. It came of a tradition. So engagement was always secondary for me. Sharing, record keeping and then engagement. Fast forwarding to today, and when I say today I’m going to talk about the last couple of months, primarily I am seeing less engagement on Twitter over the past couple of months. And it’s not like I got a Matt Mullenweg type of response anytime I sneezed on Twitter or anything like that. But I knew what I got and any of my followers were probably following mostly just for the occasional link I would share or something like that.

Who knows. But I got most of my followers. We get a bot now and then, but that’s fine. But these days it seems like, especially since December, maybe even Thanksgiving, it just seems like less people are liking the standard stuff. So it’s not like my content has changed that much or making a comment. It just seems like overall less engagement. I have no idea about how many views, I really don’t pay attention that much to analytics because like I said, that engagement’s secondary to me. I just noticed that when people respond or they like things because I get those notifications, but also I’m starting to get… I’m getting followers, but most, or some of them or I would say half of them sometimes they’re weird.

It’s not obvious bots because I know a bot when I see it, but there’ll be people joining and it’s just like, why are you a pizza place in Istanbul following me or something? And it looks like I’m looking back and I’m looking at their tweets and it’s like from six months ago. And it seems like they’re talking about random things. I don’t talk politics on Twitter. So if there’s any political, that’s a red flag for me. Usually if it’s mostly someone randomly doing some political stuff and that sort of thing. And then I’m starting to get now the obvious more of the porn follows, which those are fun, I immediately block those.

I’m not big on follower count, but I do see that now when I wake up the morning, oh, I’ve got more people following me. Oh, who are these people? Some of them are legit though. Some of them are still legit. It’s mostly from when I wake up, it’s usually people from overseas or because you can see WordPress or websites or something in they’re bio and I think those are real people. So overall engagement has been down and the people that are following or the things that are following me now on Twitter are just weird or outright like porn. And the quality is like, maybe they were always there, but now no one’s actively removing these accounts.

Maybe that sort of thing. So that’s what I’ve found so far. And my follower count, I haven’t added new people to follow to my Twitter account in a while, but the number has gone down maybe 15 to 20.

Bob: Okay, that’s interesting.

David: Yeah, so I think if I haven’t unfollowed anybody, that means maybe are closed Twitter accounts.

Bob: What I found out was, and I have the same history as you since probably around the same time, and I’ll go off on little conversations, but I’m not on there to just constantly engage about everything in my aspect of my life. So it’s more sharing, like you said. And I look for content there. I use tweet deck, so I’m on the desktop, so I am able to put in people who I really want to follow and pay attention to. I can put them in lists and organize it that way. And I don’t see all the weird stuff going on, but my history’s about the same. But I found this app and I just used it for a month just because I wanted to check out some stuff. So I was watching, I’ve been watching it because I’m more intrigued with how other people… It’s not like I’m obsessed with Twitter, but I’m intrigued with what happened since late October when he took over everything, people start bailing and threatening.

So I’m about, I don’t know, I might be similar to you in followers. I think I have 16,000. Oh, huge number. So I went back and I looked in the stats and it was interesting to see that since that happened on October twenties at [inaudible 00:08:58] or whatever, I’ve had 282 unfollowers. Now, as much as there was all this threatening, I thought, are people really, the threat is maybe I’m leaving but I’m leaving my account there. So of those 282 unfollows since then, 173 of them were either suspended or deactivated.

So deactivated means they close their account and their history and suspended is a people that just, they get suspended one time and then they come back or something. They said something bad or whatever. So then during that exact same time, I had 272 new followers. So just a little bit less. So I’ve stayed even. And the things I, looking at the stats, because this gives you a lot of different information, I always tell people, if you have a lot of followers, even 10,000 or more, you’ll be surprised when you go in because this particular thing I subscribe to tells me when’s the last time somebody tweeted. And you’ll be just surprised how how much of your audience has been stale for five, seven, eight years, especially if you have that history. So the numbers, your following numbers, we probably all know really don’t mean squat because you never know. I noticed that more people, I ended up unfollowing more people and it was really interesting to see as people started not tweeting as much like the last month or the last two months or the last three months. And a lot of those people that were not tweeting were the ones that were putting the Mastodon thing in their profile or in their name. So they were obviously leaving their Twitter account active.

David: Which I believe is probably the smart thing to do.

Bob: Yeah. But not basically using it now, like you said, I’m getting word bots and stuff. Yeah, strange, interesting stuff that just, yeah, whatever. And…

David: It’s like high school, attractive women following me? This is suspicious.

Bob: But I’m getting a lot of followers from Asia. Very few of them are North American or even US, the people outside the US seem to be hanging in there more. And another thing I noticed is when I looked at the accounts that were deactivated or hadn’t been tweeted, well the accounts that people just closed, they said, hey, I’m through with Twitter, I’m out of here. The majority of those have less than 1,000 followers. So they didn’t have a lot of skin in the game.

David: And some people don’t use social media that often either.

Bob: Yeah. And so it was easy for them to close their account. They’re like, okay, well I’m never here that much anyway. And then of course the real popular ones can carry their audience over to wherever they go. So anyway, that was just some interesting stuff and it’s becoming a very unique landscape now with all of this.

David: Combine it too with, first of all, people outside probably the US probably don’t realize a lot of what’s going on. Some people still rely on Twitter as their primary means of touching base. There’s a lot of communities on Twitter that still rely on Twitter for their communications, especially for underrepresented groups, minorities, that sort of thing. And two, you and me, Bob, we probably have saturated the WordPress Twitter market. We occasionally get, I can’t remember, every once in a while there is somebody in the US that follows me. I don’t monitor it that closely, but I do notice when people show up because it’s like, oh, maybe I know this person more. Maybe I’ve seen them at a work camp or something. I know I can’t imagine anybody still following me at this point because what do I talk about? I give out bad memes, bad jokes, and I talk about WordPress and I retweet a few people.

So long story short, it’s like, yeah, I can’t imagine there being that many more people on Twitter that are actively looking and seeking me out. I always wonder how they find me in the first place. I imagine it’s some sort of algorithm or something. But yeah, so I think there are still people legitimately using Twitter. Twitter still has value, but it’s like in the nineties for me. It’s like when certain parts of the mall start to get a little ghost town-ish. Kind of has that vibe a little bit sometimes.

Bob: Oh yeah, you notice that big time. And I’ve noticed it as well. So looking at, we’re going to get into Mastodon soon, but I want to look at the other players. Now, LinkedIn. There’s LinkedIn, there’s a couple others I know, and I might ask you what you’ve tested the waters for myself, LinkedIn, I’ve been having quite a bit of luck with it.

David: Good.

Bob: And what I notice about LinkedIn is that most people complain about LinkedIn. The first thing they complain about is the spam they get in their direct message. And I’m like, well hey, I get spam in everything I’m involved with in one way or another. So I ignore that. But on the other hand, some of that has been, what do I want to say, pseudo spam where I think, okay, who is this person? I’ll respond to them. I’ll say, no, I’m not interested, or no, I don’t need that. Thanks for… Or have you looked at my profile? And there’s been a few times that actually I got some conversation going with somebody that initially was just trying to sell something, but then realized that maybe there’s more to this than just that. So giving them the benefit of the doubt.

And I just am getting more interaction on LinkedIn. I like the content, it’s not buried in social nonsense or whatever you want to call, I shouldn’t call it nonsense, but the conversations that I can sometimes put aside and I don’t have time for. That I can just look at, okay, this is information somebody is sharing. And I know there’s a lot of sales there, but there’s a lot of sales everywhere. So LinkedIn is pretty good. I want to talk about Tumblr, but what have you been, aside from Mastodon, which I want to dive into, any of the other ones or do you try any of the other…

David: There hasn’t been too much on the radar lately. Twitter has grown to fit a unique worldwide community type of thing. And very few social networks have gone to that scale historically. Recently there’s been a lot of Twitter clones that are trying that. I tried posts for a while but couldn’t get into it. Especially it’s a web, it looks like just a WordPress or buddy press activity stream basically. I think that’s venture capitals as well. And we’ll get into probably till this later, why I don’t care for much about venture capital rate stuff anymore. I haven’t tried any of the new recent up comers you’d never heard of. I’ve been on LinkedIn forever. I remember when the main reason why you are on LinkedIn was to get connections. That was like, you connect this, connect that, connect that. And then I played for it for a while and I’m like, why am I doing this?

And then they only showed, I think the highest number is 500 plus on LinkedIn. If you have more than 500 connections, it’s just a 500 plus thing. I kept connecting with it. I kept on it, but I have just started recently looking back into it as in terms of what kind of content, like this Tumblr, we’ll talk about Tumblr in a second, but the LinkedIn I think is really the more professions. It’s like, we used the mall analogy earlier, I think LinkedIn is more of one of those, the little meetups you go to just to exchange your business cards. I remember when I first started freelancing, I went to one of those Better Business Bureau Local Chapter things.

Bob: And there’s that other chapter, that other one I’m drawing a blank on. I know what you’re talking about.

David: It’s like the whole purpose there was basically to network and then recruiters would maybe find you. That’s what I think, LinkedIn is professional. I just looked at my messages on LinkedIn now and yes, I got not as many as I would think spam stuff, but I think I will be investing in it a little bit more in terms of, I’m not going to post memes up there or anything, but if I do have anything I think that’s business related. And there’s a couple of WordPress chapters in there I want to check out as well. We’ll get into why in a minute. Tumblr, I am posting mainly memes and jokes too and getting the handle of that. So LinkedIn and Tumblr right now are my… LinkedIn, Tumblr, and then Mastodon. I know the three things I’m experimenting with right now because they’re distinct audiences in each.

Bob: Tumblr’s interesting. When I was at the state of the word in New York in December, I had a conversation with the new, I think she’s a COO of Tumblr. Do automatic. And her name is, I’m drawing a blank. Anyway, it was fun just talking to her because I was saying how I was starting to dabble in it and she said, it’s a very unique platform. You got to find your little space and your groove there. And it’s true. I’m looking at, I’m doing some snippet audio things. I do video every once in a while. I’ll throw something bizarre on it, a photo, but it is very eclectic. It’s been interesting just to connect with people there. I don’t really connect so much as I just enjoy feel of it.

David: It has its own atmosphere, it has its own climate. When you post, there’s confetti that pops up. So it’s like, I post to it occasionally, but I’ve been slowly growing my use of it, my getting used to it. I get followers out of the blue there. So organically people are finding things, but it’s a different environment and audience. It’s more, it’s not nerdy, it’s geeky, it’s arty, it’s fun. And it’s really the only social network out there like that. You can go in there and just start posting things because you’re writing your own blog. And if people find you, that’s fine. I post memes. It’s the playground on the social network campus I think.

Bob: It’s interesting. I think I’m going to hang in there with that and see where it goes because I’m intrigued with it. And I’ll be honest with everybody, it’s part of the automatic family. So I have a little bit more faith in things and then maybe if it wasn’t because I kind of know the people behind it. So there’s something, I know there’s potential there.

David: And you have faith too, right? There’s faith there. Matt said something about it going fully open source recently. It’s using Gutenberg a little bit. So I’m curious. I have faith and really it’s the only thing left out of Web 2.0 that has survived, and it’s kept its soul more or less. I think maybe LinkedIn is probably old too, but it’s kept its vibe. But Tumblr, I just want to be here to see what happens.

Bob: I know. That’s how I feel. I feel like I need to be here and I need to have some kind of a presence in however that evolves.

David: Yeah. And I’m trying my kids to use it. What other social network besides Instagram is probably like a draw one’s, younger people try to find it, but yeah.

Bob: That’s it. Well, let’s move on to Mastodon because that’s the elephant in the room. No, the Mastodon in the room.

David: Oh, you drive a tusk sale there. Well, where do you want to start?

Bob: Oh man. I will be honest. I went into it kicking and hollering type of thing because I couldn’t get it. And I think a lot of people can relate to that and…

David: What was it about you couldn’t get?

Bob: I just couldn’t wrap my brain around the concept of the instances. I could in an organic way, I mean very broad, but once I got in there it was like…

David: No. Was it the fact that you had to pick something in the beginning?

Bob: Well, it was. It was like why am I picking this? That was, I think, the big thing. Why am I picking this? And then I had to discover that, okay, you’re picking it for this reason to not just be stuck on this one, but you’ll interact and it’ll all go out spider webby like. It was very frustrating to me at first because it was, I think I felt like the UI was like, what am I setting up here?

David: Yeah. So was it afraid of commitment? You’d be afraid you’d be trapped in something or?

Bob: No, I wasn’t afraid of commitment and I just was lost in the beginning. I really didn’t. And I’m fairly technical, but I felt like, what’s the point of choosing my instance? That was the biggest thing because nothing was really clear, even though people would explain it’s like, well, it doesn’t really matter which one you choose.

David: Then why am I choosing it? Why don’t I get a default?

Bob: Yeah. Then it’s like, okay, that isn’t helping me because I still need to choose. And I ended up changing instances one time. Yeah. Anyway, what was your first experience with it?

David: Well, I joined it in 2018 technically on Mastodon technology. And I think from what I recall, I had the same feeling you did. I think later I realized it’s like email, but if someone had never used email before, what’s the first question you would ask them? Where do you want your email hosted? And they’re like, what? I don’t care. Or where do you think I should host it? This is something that a lot of either highly tech people or longtime Mastodoners, I’ll go with that phrase.

Bob: Yeah, that sounds good. I like that. Yeah.

David: Anything else I can think of would sound too dirty, but Mastodoners would probably say, well, what’s the big deal? You just pick something and you go, no, no, no, you don’t understand. Simple always wins in terms of an experience. And you ask even a question and it’s just like what you just asked, why am I doing this? Who’s the best one to pick? And you can’t even pick a default one because that instance or server, unbeknownst to maybe you, they had to shut down one of the most popular one. Not shut down, but turn off the registrations on one because they were getting too popular. So my experience when starting in 2018, I joined it on Mastodon technology. I made a few posts, but Twitter was just not attractive enough, or was too attractive at the time.

So I kept my account there. And then I came back in September of this past year, and it turns out the instance or server I was on was closing down and they require a lot of notification time so people can move from there. So I moved from Mastodon technology over to phpcc.social. I figured because I knew more now, and I’m like, if I’m moving neighborhoods, I might as well move into a neighborhood that wasn’t too WordPress specific, but was PHP specific. Because I’m always like, what if one day I decide, ah, no more WordPress, but I’ll stick with PHP.

I think that’s a safe bet. Let me go there. And there wasn’t any big WordPress stuff at the time. So that’s what I did. It was a pain in the neck to do, even for me as a tech person. So my experiences was, it recently has been, I still don’t see how any average person would go through either the onboarding process or once they find out that, oh, I want to move somewhere else. I figured it out now, I want to move here. Well, your posts aren’t going to go over. At least when I did it, I had to export CSV files for my followers and for the people I was following and the followers, I’m like, there is no sane human being that’s going to do this. I’m a tech person, I’m a nerd and I don’t want to do it. So the whole, and I’m like, you mean they haven’t perfected this since 2018?

CSV files? And so I understand it’s not supposed to replace Twitter and it shouldn’t be, whatever your views are on it. I agree with that. I’m down with that. But still, I think the onboarding can be a little bit easier and I think they’ve wasted some potential or potential has been wasted and this hasn’t really changed that much. And now when you have the opportunity to expose the world to this technology or this concept, people don’t care about whether it’s federated or not. Most people won’t care. They’re just like, can I communicate? Is there people there that I can follow? Is my social people there? Is enough social people there? And how easy is it? So what do you think?

Bob: The following thing has been, I definitely think they need to make the following easier because now, and this is what I’ve learned, and I’m hoping maybe I haven’t missed something along the way, but if somebody retweets or boosts or retweets or boosts, and I go, oh, that’s cool. That’s an interesting person. I’m going to follow my click, their thing it comes up, I click follow. But if you say, Bob, here’s my Mastodon address and you send it to me, I can’t just put it in and go to your profile and click follow because then that page comes up where I have to copy that, go into my account or go into my Mastodon, put it in search, it comes up, and then I can follow you.

And to me, that’s a lot of work to follow somebody that sent me their username outside of Mastodon. And sometimes I don’t even do it. I just think, oh, I got to go through this. Okay, I got to paste in here, I got to click and go. It’s like, just give me a button or give me something that I can follow somebody from another instance easier. And I’m sure maybe the technology and everything is, do you understand what I’m saying?

David: Absolutely. That I had to actually discover or stumble upon a browser plugin that does it for you now, and I can share that. I could… And let’s say, okay, if you can do this with this technology, then maybe you can, I don’t know, build it in or something. And we’ll get the third party clients in a second, but the web experience, like I said, because it’s, and I understand the concept, it’s federated. So it’s not like if it was all on one server, you probably could find someone and click follow easily. Search on Mastodon is deliberately not encompassing all of the instances, but there is, I’ll share a link with you if you want to put it in the show notes later. But I have a extension that you can go to anybody’s Mastodon page and click follow. And through some magic you will follow.

But for the first month I was putting addresses into a search box and clicking on the follow link. The other thing that still bothers me that I have, I’m using what’s called the advanced view, which is like tweet deck.

Bob: Oh yeah, I’m using that too. Yeah.

David: So if you are using Mastodon and you want columns instead of whatever you’re viewing now, the default, you can change that in your settings. Just Google Mastodon, I think it’s advanced web view. When people follow, a lot of times I don’t have the time to go hunting for people. It’s like either somebody gives me their address or someone follows me or responds or boosts and I look and see, is this person someone I want to follow? Because if they’ve entered interaction with me on Mastodon, there is no bad users so far on Mastodon. Not like on Twitter what we talked about, right?

So I’m figuring this person is a potential person I may want to follow. The problem is I click and I get a column of their profile. I may see only one or two of their most recent posts, if any. Otherwise I have to go to a whole new webpage and view in a new tab and view their profile, or I should say not their profile because I see their profile, I’m talking about their latest posts. So there’s something preventing me from seeing a user’s latest posts. I do see occasional one or two, and maybe if they’re on the same server as I do, I get more. But at least, and this also varies by instance, by instance too.

So I could be describing something and then there’s another instance or server that has tweaked their settings in their Mastodon slightly differently. Because Mastodon is not this federation or Fediverse is not Mastodon, Mastodon’s a part of it. So there’s other applications that could hook into the Fediverse. Like there’s someone building an Instagram flicker app that you can follow in Mastodon back and forth and all that and WordPress and we’ll probably get into that in a minute. But it’s hard to discover people on Mastodon.

Bob: It really is.

David: It’s hard to follow unless you get this browser plugin and then discovering, is this somebody I want to follow? I don’t go by follower accounts, but if you haven’t posted anything, I’m going to wait and come back to you. But it’s just hard for discovering and it’s just like, I don’t want to be one of those people. I wanted to have a conversation. I want to meet new people. I don’t want to be one of those people that has 1,000 followers but only follows three people. I don’t want to seem like a jerk or antisocial. But right now the advice is just, oh, go ahead and follow someone, and if you don’t like them, unfollow them, which, okay. But things could be better.