Internet friends are real. But moots and oomfies are not friendship at its fullest potential. Once again, it's the UX's fault.
Intro
Without a shadow of a doubt, being very open, personable, sociable, and parasocial on the timeline was a core difference between my decade-plus-old, 300-follower, Twitter account and my Bluesky account, which reached 7,500 in under three years.
Despite that, I wouldn't recommend being as open and transparent on the TL as I'd been. I'd never recommend that as advice to anyone. Not even at gunpoint.
I feel like, unless you want to learn about the experiences of someone different than you, this document isn't really for you. I'm someone who has been a social floater all throughout high school (especially due to moving school if not house if not country each year), burning all K-12 bridges upon finishing secondary school. Especially the bridges built in religious schools after finding out I was queer. I built a queer found friend-family of sorts in college. In the city. Then I moved back into the suburbs, hours away.
I have few IRLs.
So if you read further and feel like "man, this crap doesn't apply to me— *ripping-headphones-off-meme*", don't say I didn't warn you.
Where All My Friends Are
Y'ever hear someone jokingly refer to a social app, or their whole phone, as being the place where all their friends are? All their friends conveniently in their pocket… That's been the truth for me. Even in the way you'd probably consider normal: all my classmates went from breathing my air, into literally being in my phone.
That said, all throughout late middle school and early high school, I made and maintained friends that I've, with exceptions, never seen in the flesh-and-blood. This has also continued through and after graduation. Friends that like, if they poked me today like "hey, what's up?" it'd be like we never even lost touch with each other. Friends who, like, if they could rock with the minor differences between the me they knew then and the weird me I've become since, it'd oxymoronically be like nothing ever changed.
I can't say the same for a lot of the "moots" and "oomfies" I have now, even though I'd love to be able to be that way with them!
What's the difference?
Modern UX and (in)convenience won't allow it.
Twitter didn't have as firm of a grip on us as Twitter/Insta/Bsky/TikTok do today.
That's not to say we didn't use it (or what of the lot existed back then). We did! But the nature of it was different. I swear things were still reverse-chrono, single-file…
That aside, we mostly hung out on Skype, anyway.
"Oh, so you mean like Discord?"
Hell, no. Not Discord at all. Remove the concept of multi-channel servers, step one. Just… single-chats and group-chats, if I remember correctly. So, like, a Signal or a WhatsApp or something. So you'd be talking to people (or small groups of them) intentionally instead of just barking at "anybody there" in a community server channel. And, of what I can remember, there weren't those blasted metricated emoji reactions, either.
We just communicated. And we sought each other out specifically and deeply. And we spent time together in different ways. Ways people still do online, mind you. Voice calls, live streaming, and sending parcels and mail aren't dying arts. Even if I think the Discord UX adds more things to muddy the experience of person-to-person communication…
…the more core problem is, I feel like Social Media prevents people, potential friends, from even making it to Discord and Discord-likes in the first place.
Convenience is a Fast and Shallow River
Social Media is where my friends are. Social Media is where I've been. Social Media is where I'm the tiny concept of a beating heart, and I live in your phone. Social Media holds a stripped-down version of me that you will never fully understand, but Social Media is where you like to find me, 'cause it's convenient. Unlike back then, I will never again be sought out in any deeper way, because life is hard, and convenience is God.
You go to Jay (or Elon, or Mosseri, or Zuck, or Chew) to find me.
She holds pieces of me, but never the full thing. I can't fit within the shape of the platform.
On Bluesky, I must chop up my long, flowing thoughts into 300-character beads on a string we call "thread". If my thoughts require imagery, I must strip them of their context, and they'd better tell some sort of contextualized story in a set of four or less.
How can anyone ever achieve an understanding of me in these small slices? It's futile. Misinterpretation is inherent. Encouraged, even. (Shoutout subtweets and quote-dunks. Shoutout engagement metrics.) It becomes worse when context collapses, and they're shared out of network (whaddup Discover Feed?). What good is a drawing of an original character? I have four images and alt text with which to help a scroller-by understand them and get attached to them. Fail, and I and my OC are forgotten to the flow of time(line). 'Cause no one ever makes it to the bottom.
Might as well vanish and make a comic instead of promoting one that's still being developed (I keep telling myself this!)
The population is immeasurable. So are the voices, so are the statements, so is the firehose.
There's no point in repeating myself, so I'll move on.
Social Media provides you with a few ways of letting me know that my chopped-up, quartered, gutted, lobotomized thoughts and artistic expressions made you smile.
You can press the like button.
Button-press go brrr…
What was it about my thought or art piece that you liked? That is for Jay (or Elon, or Mosseri, or Zuck, or Chew) to know (so they can tailor their algorithms), and for me to die wondering.
You can comment. In similar, disjointed, 300-character beads on strings of "thread".
The hurry to return to the scroll and consume as many posts as you can before lunch break is over will probably lead you to just say something brief and get on with it, though.
I can't blame anyone much for this.
The Social Media UX made you lobotomize your comment, just like it made me lobotomize my own thoughts/art in order to get them in front of you.
You can ReShare my post.
Thanks! Genuinely.
People who manually choose to share my posts are typically within my interest network, which means that their shares are highly unlikely to end up causing a containment breach. That's typically the nosy Discover Feed's fault. I feel like at this point, reach, exposure, promotion, is the main reason we even try with this constantly enshittifying technology anymore. That and community.
It's a shame that no matter how much the market, the userbase for Social Media tries to build community through it, community isn't really the point seen by the companies that design the platforms.
What's Missing
The point of a Social Media platform isn't to write a lengthy letter on how someone's art or insight made you feel.
The point of a Social Media platform isn't to do a deep or intimate catch-up on how someone you care about has been doing.
The point of a Social Media platform isn't to be there for a friend, flesh or long-distance, when they're breaking down and really need you.
The point of a Social Media platform isn't to ask "how's Mom?" or "is your brother's ankle healing up?" and get a deep answer. Heck, the point of a Social Media platform isn't to become a household name in oomfie's family, to begin with.
The point of a Social Media platform isn't to coordinate a care package. Or to even learn enough about someone that you can know what you'd want to put inside of one.
That's the point of Direct Messaging.
No, not Discord.
The Cerberus of Direct Messaging
Discord is a sort of monster that has grown too many heads. And a lot of them look familiar to Zuck and Jack and Mosseri and the like.
Emoji reactions.
We're really going to bring the absolute brainrot that metricated like buttons have caused… to direct messaging? They're kinda harmless as far as 1-on-1 DMs and small group chats go, but allow me to debunk "servers" real quick.
"Servers" are the same brainrot as Social Media platforms, but with smaller populations. You ever feel like there's a sweetspot for the population size of a Discord server, and once one grows past that, it's got all the same pains and brainrot as "real social media" but Diet-Coke style? It's not a coincidence.
Feeling bad when you don't get enough metricated (why are they metricated?!) emoji reactions or quick enough replies to something you said or shared? Feels similar to how you feel when a post flops on Social Media?
Yeah, cause it's the same crap, just smaller.
Like-button presses and reply speeds aren't even supposed to mean anything in what're meant to just be Text Messages™. But, the population, speed, and flow of larger community servers bring all the same feelings, anxieties, and pains as Social Media.
Population and speed… they prevent us from sending full-bodied thoughts. Gotta say something short, something now, something fast, before the chatty and sizeable Discord community moves the conversation somewhere else. Gotta gut and lobotomize my thought so I can get it in real quick. And… oops! Lobotomizing it caused it to be misconstrued, just like Social Media.
Scrolling through old Skype logs was like excavating caves. One log per contact/group-chat, though, so it was possible.
Having been a Discord mod for many a community server, I've gotten kinda wieldy at my search-fu, but good luck digging back into a multi-channel server for something-you-said-that-one-time. Especially the ones with massive populations of yappers (says the yapper). Good, luck.
An Ode to Email (and Other Asynchronous Online Messaging)
I miss emails. I miss non-"server" DMs/IMs.
But nowadays, within the online-side of my age group, it's only convenient to find one of your friends—one of your acquaintances, where you can also find all 1,000+ (that's bigger than Dunbar's number…) of your other ones.
"Why the heck would I visit you at your house when I can probably find you and everyone else downtown crawling the bars on Main Street?"
"Why on earth would I send you an email or a DM when you'll drag your sorry arse to the timeline to show me another pikshure you drew—if not now, eventually?"
I guess you're right, man.
The traits I pulled from the ASD gacha probably have a lot to do with it, but I've come to find that socially, I operate better in low-population spaces, with slower, longer, and more asynchronous, reply-how-you-want-when-you-want, messaging.
The fewer people I speak to at once, and the fewer people listening to me at once, the easier it is for my mind to juggle and balance all conversational participants, all audience members, and as many audience interpretations as I can.
When I don't have body language and vocal inflections as variables that I can use and (attempt to) interpret, I tend to speak and communicate better where I can write and edit freely at any length, and where others can do the same.
Something, something spoon theory.
I feel better with messaging that I can defer until I have enough energy and am in a healthy enough mood to reply. And I feel less anxious waiting on replies in mediums and formats where the cultural expectation is not for said replies to be instant.
IE: ("Their reply isn't slow because I suck or they hate me, it's slow because this messaging medium isn't a notification hellscape and my communication partner has yet to check their inbox because they're busy. Maybe sometime this week!")
I like picking and choosing what of someone's message I reply to. If someone writes me a big chungus email, it's less awkward if I have more to respond to on some topics and less, or outright nothing, to say in response to other parts of the letter.
Instant messaging is so slim and single-file that if someone tells me one small thing that I feel nothing about, and I just stay silent, the conversation doesn't get to move forward. Or if it does, I'm being mean and ignoring what they sent by switching topics.
I love emails. I feel like they're the answer to my online social stresses. A communication method made for me. I even have some love for non-server, non-multi-channel Discord (and Discord-like) Direct Messages, provided I can choose how and when I reply without cultural connotations being assumed and interpreted by the recipient.
I want that from people.
Alas
But screw that, right? "I want all my friends and acquaintances corralled into as few apps and 'servers' as possible, and I want it now!"
"God forbid I reach out to just one friend on their own!"
"Emails are for job applications and store coupons!"
And for that reason, because people don't want to find me on my own, I've poured the personhood that should be experienced one-on-one, in small, slow communication, onto the modern, post-pandemic, turbo-algorithmic timeline for all to spectate and misunderstand.
And my mind is worse for it.