What I want from social media

07 Dec 2025

• Thinking about sharing more on social media, with goals:
  • share stuff with many people who would value it
  • understand how people see and react to it
  • collaborate
  • build relationships and reputation from that sharing
  • resist related dysfunctional effects, e.g. spam, scams, doxing and other privacy problems, empowering and fostering evil, enpoopification, lockin

Ha, very “meta-“, in the sense that, in the middle of writing, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice if this entry could be a wiki entry, so that people could contribute, and we could maintain a directory of the current best contenders, or perhaps create a design doc?”

I’m not interested in doing any self-promotional work.

My two questions right now are:

• what should I use right now for this?
• should I build something that other people could use for this too?

I’ve been using “GitHub Pages”, mostly because it’s free and open, and seems like it’ll be a around for a bit without lockin. It’s ridiculously bad for the goals above, when the stuff in question isn’t a software project. It does nothing for discoverability and the “reach” which is social media’s most dramatic accomplishment. GitHub is great for hosting information, but the real challenge is in intelligently promoting information.

There’s currently a tension between reach and lockin. If you really want reach, you go for reddit, x, and linkedin, but those platforms are hostile to openness. Perhaps the right thing to build is something to help web pages, nostr, bluesky, or mastodon with recommendations.

Tangentially, I wonder about linking identity across open platforms.

Regarding cross-posting, just tried Openvibe, and it looks promising. As a currently unsocial media person, I missed the ability to create new accounts on those platforms from within Openvibe. As an oldster, missed the ability to quickly increase the text size (it can be done via setting though). As somebody who started this post about sharing, I noticed that Openvibe’s recommendations for my three initial topics were pretty bad.

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