Taylor Lorenz

And I'm on Mastodon and threads.

I'm on, you know, all of them.

Blue sky.

I mean, blue sky has a lot of, and same with threads.

Honestly, it has a lot of like kind of progressive people that like quit over Elon.

So it's like this kind of self-selected group, but, um, there's also a lot of people that believe in like open protocol technology on blue sky, which I appreciate, you know, it's like developers, um,

Well, so, you know, Blue Sky and Mastodon, they're both built in this like federated model of social media, which is really different than how we think of it.

It's like kind of like, you know, how you have your phone number now, but if you switch, like maybe you have AT&T, but if you switch to Verizon, you still have all your contacts and your services and change.

You could quit Blue Sky tomorrow and join like a competitive service that's on the same federated network and you would take all your followers with you.

So that's kind of different than the rest of social media.

yeah so this is something that they've tried to argue for over a hundred years before social media you know even existed we had this idea of being addicted to media and communication as far back as the day of novels there were novels that were banned for being too addictive um they tried to ban radio shows soap operas uh

you know, television, comic books like you name it.

Also, just any form of new technology.

I was reading some old articles from the 90s about Walkman and people listening to CDs.

And they were saying that actually listening to music as you walk through the world would fundamentally rewire your brain.

And this was very dangerous.

We needed to take the Walkman away from kids.

So I think a lot of these arguments made are not, you know,

I'm not a believer in them, honestly.

That doesn't mean that I don't think social media is highly compelling and that people can't have extremely problematic compulsive use.