A few years ago, I abandoned social media entirely. It was an excellent decision, and I quite enjoyed my time away from all those sites and their distractions. Eventually, to my chagrin, I returned: for professional reasons, in that when one wants to get eyes on one’s work in software… social media is one of the few good options.¹ Since then, I have tried to keep my social media time to a relative minimum. I work very hard not to spend more than a handful of minutes a day on all social media platforms combined.

My need to use social media has only grown, though, between starting to try to build back up my presence as a member of the Rust community while working on The Rust Programming Language book² and trying to build up other consulting opportunities³ on the one hand, and trying to build an audience as a working composer on the other.

So: how am I using social media these days?

1. I keep it limited, and that goes for both what we think of traditionally as “social media”, i.e. Twitter/X, Facebook, etc., and also chat contexts like Slack or Discord channels. I use Freedom to schedule large blocks of time every single day where all those are blocked. This is the most important part of my strategy. It helps me avoid getting sucked into the churn of social media reading and interacting, and stay focused on the work I actually care about.

2. I most actively participate in a handful of social chat communities, including:

   • A private room for people closely associated with a Christian magazine of ideas I work with from time to time.
   • A number of open source software Discord servers; I am most active in the Jujutsu server lately.
   • The CoRecursive community Slack

3. I use LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, and Twitter/X for posting about software. The content across each of those is usually largely the same, though tailored lightly for different platforms: a full-length post on LinkedIn vs. threads on Bluesky, for example. The content there is usually short-form thoughts triggered by things I am building, writing, or reading. I share a bit of personal content on the non-LinkedIn channels as well, e.g. about running and cycling (which are a pretty big part of my life these days!), because no one wants to follow someone whose obvious goal is just business acquisition (and I could not stand myself if I posted that way)!

4. I use dedicated accounts on Bluesky, Threads, Instagram, and a Facebook page for posting about music. I am, honestly, not great at this yet! I need to build up some “muscles” around using tools like Buffer to just crank out a regular “drip” of content there which can drive traffic back to the things I actually care about: the music newsletter and music website, and most of all the music itself.

Of all of the more “classic”-style social media platforms I am currently using, Bluesky is the one I like the best from both a basic app design POV (the app reminds me of old-school Twitter in good ways) and in terms of the underlying approach to building a protocol for which the app is just the first consumer. The protocol actually seems to be really good from the high-level view I have taken of it. Building in things like moderation and content filtering as part of the protocol, which can then be run at a community level, is a very good move and is, frankly, way ahead of most of what I see in the “Fediverse”.

For good and for ill, all of these channels are a lot quieter for me than Twitter was in its heyday. A lot of conversation has moved into the Slacks and Discords, and I think that is largely to the good, but it does somewhat diminish the possibility for stumbling across interesting people via open conversations with other people you find interesting. And on the other hand, even with Slack and Discord, I can too easily get sucked into an hour-long discussion rather than continuing to plug away at the work which (a) pays the bills or (b) sustains my soul or (c) best of all both. Social media is none of the above.

In any case, that’s how I am using the platforms these days!