I have mixed feelings on Facebook closing down automated posts to personal* profiles. It might cut down on spam, and it will lead to better descriptions on link posts, but it also locks you further into their silo.

You can still write elsewhere and link back to it on Facebook, but you can’t use WordPress Publicize or IFTTT to post it, or Buffer to schedule it. You have to do it manually, which adds more friction, and you can’t time-shift it. I used to spread out look-at-this-cool-link posts using Buffer, and queue them up from Pocket while offline, but I can’t do that anymore.

If you want your Facebook audience to see your words or photos, it nudges you to maybe just post on Facebook to begin with (never mind that you want its main home to be somewhere you have more control). And it’s another way for them to get you back onto the site so they can try to keep you there for another 15 minutes, see some more ads, and generate more value content for Facebook.

Then again, I can’t help looking at it in terms of the debate over cross-posting from Twitter to Mastodon. There’s an argument that if you’re not actually on the platform, you’re not contributing to it. And while that debate tends to focus on auto-posts from a specific mismatched (and hostile) community, I think it’s fair to consider the broader context that if you’re not at least following up, you’re not really participating. (I’m especially guilty of that with my cross-posts to Tumblr.)

Though I suppose it matters more to a smaller community like the Fediverse than to something as massive as Facebook.

*Pages and groups can still accept automatic posts through the API, but those supposedly represent a business, or an organization, or a public persona rather than a “real” person.

Expanded from a Mastodon post on Wandering.Shop.

You can broadly categorize social networks, or really any communication software, based on four criteria:

  1. Are replies subordinate to the original post (Facebook, Instagram, blog comments) or top-level posts but linked (Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, blogs with pingbacks/trackbacks/webmentions)?
  2. Do you primarily follow people/organizations (all the above) or topics (Reddit, message boards)?
  3. Is the default interaction one-on-one (email, Skype) or broadcast (most of what we call “social media” these days)?
  4. Is it a single service (Facebook, Twitter), a collection of isolated services (message boards), or a collection of interacting services (email, the Fediverse, blogs to some extent)?

More than whether the content is likely to be short text, long text, a photo, a video, or a link, these questions define the types of connections and types of interactions that people are going to have.

Mastodon is one of a newer crop of decentralized social networks that are trying to put the users first instead of building everything around ads, tracking, and attention-grabbing feedback loops.

It’s open source software run on a bunch of smaller networks, mostly volunteer-run, each with its own policies and moderators. (You can even run one yourself if you want!) These smaller networks can talk to each other behind the scenes, allowing you to follow and interact with people across networks (that’s where “federation” comes in). Each instance has a different community and flavor, and each is part of the broader community.

I’ve been on for a few months now. It takes a while to settle in, and it feels kind of like the early, optimistic days of Twitter, plus there’s an effort to learn from the past and make it better this time. You can find me at kelsonv@mastodon.social @kelsonv@wandering.shop (general discussion) and @kelsonv@photog.social (photography).

If you’re interested in trying it out, joinmastodon.org is a good place to start, and can suggest which instances might be a good fit. And this Brief Introduction to Mastodon goes into a bit more detail on how to use it and what the culture and etiquette is like.