Keeping in touch with everyone you ever met

Posted on February 10, 2025 by Ben Cotton

In my post last week on my shift in social media habits, I wrote in a comment “the idea that we can keep some semblance of connection to everyone we’ve ever met is a pretty recent phenomenon. I wonder if it will last.” My friend Chris O’Donnell (who may or may not be the actor), wrote in reply

I’ve been questioning if keeping in touch with everyone you’ve ever met is actually a good thing. Also, I downloaded my friend list on Facebook (actually screen scrapped it as requesting it from FB only got me 10 names). Then I put it in a spreadsheet and went through all 258 names and rated then as yes or no on “would it really bother me if I never spoke to them again?”

Only 78 people passed the test. I’m considering if I could just check in with them via text or email occasionally.

I’ve been thinking about that. I am, as America sang, “one poor correspondent…but that doesn’t mean you ain’t been on my mind.” I’m the sort where once you become one of My People, you’re My People forever. I might go years without an interaction, but when I do, it’s like no time has passed. Just Friday I texted a friend that I hadn’t talked to in months because a USC basketball player’s surname was the same as her given name.

For the entirety of human history, people came and went from our lives, and only a few that went maintained some kind of connection. In the last two decades, that has changed. Not only has social media allowed us to stay in touch, but we even take our phone numbers with us. Your phone number used to indicate where you live, now it indicates where you lived when you got your first cell phone.

There’s an unprecedented permanence in casual relationships. I think I fall on the side of liking it. It allows me to remain at least passively connected to people I cared about without having to make the choice that “yeah, their presence in my life is actually done now.” Perhaps that’s a personality flaw of mine. Time will tell whether or not this is good for society, but in the short term, I think we need all of the connections we can get.

A shift in my social media habits

Posted on February 7, 2025 by Ben Cotton

Amazingly, it’s been slightly less than a month since Mark Zuckerberg decided that hate speech is good and facts are bad. As you may recall, that decision led me to create a Bluesky account. It also led me to dramatically reduce my Facebook and Instagram use, although the latter was pretty sporadic to begin with. In that time I’ve noticed a definite shift in how I use social media.

For one, I’m just on it a lot less. It doesn’t take long for me to get caught up on Bluesky and Mastodon. I follow almost no one on Pixelfed so far, so that’s quick, too. This leaves me with a lot of time to do other things. For example, I successfully completed the “read every day in January” challenge on The Story Graph for the first time this year. There were a few days where I’d just do a couple of pages or a few minutes of an audio book in order to check the box, but most days I read for an hour or so. I’m also writing more, as evidenced by the number of posts on this blog lately.

Twitter always felt like the most natural platform for me, since it favors short shitposts. My brain makes so many of those. For some reason (perhaps because my network was mostly people I knew through my professional work), I never felt as comfortable doing that on Mastodon. But on Bluesky, it’s like the good old days.

Surprisingly to me, I’ve cross-posted a lot more than I thought I would, thanks to Openvibe. I’m normally opposed to cross-posting, but since Mastodon and Bluesky are largely the same format, I guess my aversion is lessened. Some stuff still goes to one or the other, but I really expected myself to always direct posts to a single choice. I’m still learning about myself at the age of 41.

I haven’t completely abandoned Facebook (and you are not invited to argue why I should), but I only check it briefly every few days. Years ago, I had gotten my usage to near zero, but then Twitter went to hell and Facebook had the largest share of my People™. Surprisingly, simply removing the app shortcut from my home screen has kept me from opening it out of boredom. Now when I go to Facebook, it’s because I’m actively choosing to check in.

Partially as a side effect of the smaller networks on the platforms I use and partly because of intentional choices, I find myself doomscrolling less. I’m following a lot fewer journalists and Online Political Opinion Havers than I did in the old days. I have enough ways of finding out what new terrors appear every day that I not need to immerse myself in it. That seems to have helped my mental state quite a bit (duh, right?).

By the way, did you know I have a weekly-ish newsletter? Subscribe if you’d like. If you have one, let me know and I’ll subscribe to yours.

Prepare the lifeboats?

Posted on December 19, 2022 by Ben Cotton

When do I leave Twitter? That’s a very good question and I don’t have a very good answer for it. But last night I decided to go ahead and create a Mastodon account just in case. It’s been less than two months since I wrote “Mastodon won’t save us“. I stand by everything I wrote there. But as Elon Musk continues to corncob at an accelerating pace, there may not be a Twitter to cling to much longer.

Where are my people?

Someone on Mastodon objected to my use of the word “lifeboat”. But that’s what it is. I care about Mastodon as a technology exactly as much as I care about Twitter: none cares. The important part is the social aspect. I ran my accounts through the Movetodon tool. Of the 2708 accounts I follow on Twitter, it found 380 Mastodon accounts. I’ve manually added 19 others. Most of them are my tech friends.

Don’t get me wrong, I love my tech friends. But what about the ~2300 others? My timeline gets a lot less interesting if 85% of the people I follow disappear.

Will I use it?

I know myself well enough to know that I crave the interactions of social media. Because I try to associate myself with kind people, my replies are almost universally soothing to my overwhelming sense of insufficiency. So even if Twitter survives, I’ll probably end up active on Mastodon without meaning to be. That’s how I roll.

One thing I’ve already noticed, though, is that I’ve skipped on posting a few things already this morning. I wasn’t sure if I should post to Twitter or Mastodon, so decided not to post at all. I have long believed that cross-posting to various social media sites is anti-social and I have no desire to maintain parallel streams of thought. I guess we’ll have to see how this plays out.

Twitter’s future

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Ben Cotton

So Elon Musk is planning on buying Twitter. I say “planning” here because the deal hasn’t closed. But let’s assume it happens. What will it mean?

Not a Musk fan

I’ll be blunt: Elon Musk is a charlatan who gets a lot more credit than he deserves. I don’t doubt he’s a smart person, but being the richest person on the planet has allowed him to engage in unrestrained buffoonery. Whatever his areas of expertise, they clearly don’t extend to understanding tunnels. The best thing he could do would be to leave Twitter alone, but you don’t spend $44 billion to not play with you new toy.

But free speech!

No. Elon Musk doesn’t believe in free speech. He canceled someone’s Tesla order for saying mean things. “Free speech” arguments are almost never about anything other than “I should be allowed to say what I want without consequences.”

Free speech, as envisioned by absolutists, is only free for those with power. If your free speech is used to harass others into silence, the platform does not promote free speech. I’m fine with letting the Nazis and democracy subverters go off to any of the other Twitter-like sites they’ve set up.

So what next?

The key question is “to the degree they left, will the Nazis and democracy subverters come back to Twitter?” I can’t say. For now, I’m not planning to leave Twitter. If it becomes intolerable, I’ll go. To where? Good question! Mastodon holds no appeal to me for a variety of reasons, but maybe I’ll move there at some point. Maybe I’ll just drop that form of social media from my life.

It seems more likely to me that Musk will discover that running a social media site is less fun than criticizing a social media site and get bored. He does have two other companies to run already. Three if you take The Boring Company seriously. While he certainly could do damage, I hope that it remains the shitty hellsite we’ve come to hate. After all, Twitter has mostly succeeded in spite of itself.

GitHub’s new status feature

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Ben Cotton

Two weeks ago, GitHub added a new feature for all users: the ability to set a status. I’m in favor of this. First, it appeals to my AOL Instant Messenger nostalgia. Second, I think it provides a valuable context for open source projects. It allows maintainers to say “hey, I’m not going to be very responsive for a bit”. In theory, this should let people filing issues and pull requests not get so angry if they don’t get a quick response.

Jessie Frazelle described it as the “cure for open source guilt”.

https://twitter.com/jessfraz/status/1083047358667972608

I was surprised at the amount of blowback this got. (See, for example the replies to Nat Friedman’s tweet.) Some of the responses are of the dumb “oh noes you’re turning GitHub into a social media platform. It should be about the code!” variety. To those people I say “fine, don’t use this feature.” Others raise a point about not advertising being on vacation.

No! We should not set a community expectation that maintainers should reveal details about their personal lives (like whether or not they are at home) on a totally open/public professional social network!
— Peter Wang 🦋 (@pwang) January 9, 2019

I’m sympathetic to that. I’m generally pretty quiet about the house being empty on public or public-ish platforms. It’s a good way to advertise yourself to vandals and thieves. To be honest, I’m more worried about something like Nextdoor where the users are all local than GitHub where anyone who cares is probably a long way away. Nonetheless, it’s a valid concern, especially for people with a higher profile.

I agree with Peter that it’s not wise to set expectations for maintainers to share their private details. That said, I do think it’s helpful for maintainers to let their communities know what to expect from them. There are many reasons that someone might need to step away from their project for a week or several. A simple “I’m busy with other stuff and will check back in on February 30th” or something to that effect would accomplish the goal of setting community expectations without being too revelatory.

The success of this feature will rely on users making smart decisions about what they choose to reveal. That’s not always a great bet, but it does give people some control over the impact. The real question will be: how much do people respect it?

We can’t replace Facebook with personal websites

Posted on December 28, 2018 by Ben Cotton

Facebook is a….troublesome…company. The rampant disregard for personal privacy or the negative effects of the platform are concerning at best and actively evil at worst. So it’s not surprise that Jason Koebler’s recent Motherboard article about replacing Facebook with personal websites got a lot of traction, particularly among my more technoliterate friends.

But it’s not an easy solution as that. In the late 90s and early 00s, we had a collection of personal websites. There’s a reason that the centralized social media model (MySpace, Facebook, etc) took hold: a decentralized social network is hard.

The first hard part is getting people to use it. Facebook, to a degree not previously seen, made it really easy for the average person to have an online presence. They could easily share updates and post photos without having to know much of anything about computers or the Internet. They don’t have to worry about keeping anything except their content up-to-date.

I agree and disagree with this.

Agree: there's a reason I host my own blog.
Disagree: sites like Facebook gave a web presence to people who would otherwise not have one — not everyone can take on the burden of site maintenance.https://t.co/Y1g6ImaXJy
— julia ferraioli (@juliaferraioli) December 21, 2018

The other hard part is connecting to those other people. It’s easy to broadcast your message out to the world. It’s harder to find those you want to keep up with. If someone is on Facebook, they’re findable. If you’re not sure it’s the John Doe you’re looking for, you have additional contextual cues like mutual friends, etc to make it more clear. That’s less clear with John Doe’s WordPress site.

And Facebook provides more social features. You can tag your friends in photos (for better and worse). It has group communication features. It has event management. It provides access control. Sure, you could put a decentralized version of that together, but that increases the complexity. At some point, if you want it to be widely used outside of the tech community, you need some kind of centralized service to act as a directory. And then at that point, why not just make the centralized service the host?

I’m not saying that a company like Facebook is inevitable. With regulation or better ethics (or both!) Facebook or a service a lot like it could provide similar value without trampling on democracy and privacy. But it’s clear that “just have a personal website” is not a real replacement for Facebook.

How are you?

Posted on December 26, 2017 by Ben Cotton

Ed Sheeran got rid of his phone two years ago. He says life is better — more balanced — now. I don’t know how well Mr. Sheeran’s experience can be applied to the general public. He’s an internationally famous musician and probably has People™ to help him manage his affairs. His status as a celebrity almost certainly affects the key line in the article:

…he got rid of his phone in part because even though people were contacting him constantly, no one was asking him how he actually was.

(Credit to Heidi Moore for bringing this to my attention.)

Certainly part of celebrity is that people are often more interested in what they can get from you than what they can do for you. That’s true for us normal folk as well, of course, but the ratio is a little more balanced. But still, we’re not as engaged in how people are doing as perhaps we should be.

I don’t blame social media or smart phones for this phenomenon. They’re merely tools that amplify our behavior. It’s much easier for us to broadcast how we’re doing (even if we’re not honest about it) and to have others passively consume it. There’s less of a need to actively ask how our friends are doing because they’ve already told us.

But there’s something to be said for the act of actively asking. The very fact that it scales poorly makes it more intimate. Even if you spend your day broadcasting how you are, it can feel good when someone takes the time to check in on you.

The passive trap is easy to fall into. I tend to think of even the most casual of acquaintances as dear friends (whether they reciprocate or not). As a result, I try to be a good friend to many, many people. This is an impossible task, so I end up being a poor friend to most of them. Maybe I should focus more intently on fewer people. Or at least pick one person each day and be more active in how I engage with them.

Who gets your Facebook messages after you die?

Posted on June 19, 2017 by Ben Cotton

Last month, a court in Germany ruled that Facebook should not be compelled to give access to the account of a teenager who died to her parents. The girl died after being struck by a train. Her parents, trying to determine if it was a suicide, wanted to look for evidence that she had been bullied. The initial court ruled in favor of the girls parents, but Facebook prevailed on appeal.

This is an excellent example of the “hard cases make bad law” adage, though I think the court arrived at the right decision here. The girl’s parents argued that it was the digital equivalent of a diary, which is an interitable item. I understand their argument. As a parent myself, I don’t doubt that I would make the same argument were I in their case. But I think the appeals court made the right decision here, although it took some thought to get to that.

It’s more than just a diary

The “it’s the same as a diary” argument makes sense only if you intentionally exclude the ways it’s not. Yes, people use Facebook to share personal musings and reflections the same way they might in a diary or journal. However, Facebook (and other social media) have an interactivity that a diary does not.

This goes beyond the fact that others may leave comments on posts. The owner of an account is not necessarily the originator of the content within the account. What I mean by that is that the messages may be initiated by someone else. Granting account access to the girl’s parents is not really about protecting her privacy, it’s about protecting the privacy of those she has communicated with.

But that’s the point, right?

The girl’s parents wanted to find evidence of bullying. Why should the privacy of the bullies be protected (in the very narrow context of their messages to the girl)? Because they’re probably not the only people who sent the girl messages. What if another friend had confided in the girl about personal matters? What right do the girl’s parents have to that communication? None, of course.

I have a hard time justifying why the girl’s account should be made available to anyone given the risk of harm to innocent third parties. If the situation were different – if the police or prosecutor were ask for specific searches as part of a case – that would be more reasonable, in my opinion. In that case, the structure and process of the investigation would minimize the harm of disclosure.

This is a hard problem

In the pre-digital age, it was less complicated. Conversations that didn’t happen face-to-face (or on the telephone) probably happened via letter. Any letters that were not destroyed became part of the estate. Some heirs probably destroyed them, others not. And though there are many threats to privacy these days, the electronic age has made possible a form of privacy that was hitherto unknown.

I’m certainly in favor of people being able to explicitly opt in to allowing someone to inherit their accounts. And not all accounts are created equal. When I die, I’d like to think someone would keep my meager website around in order to provide a legacy of sorts. But I’d also like to think that my death won’t result in the correspondence my friends have sent me in confidence. It’s not my privacy I want to protect after I die, it’s the privacy of my friends.

Snapchat sunglasses? Why they could be successful

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Ben Cotton

Snapchat’s founder announced on Friday that the company is working on a new, non-software product: sunglasses. Set to go on sale this fall, these sunglasses will include a camera that, when activated, will record 10 seconds of video. Presumably, this video will be posted to Snapchat by way of the user’s phone.

Some of the reaction I’ve seen so far is pretty predictable: “it’s like Google Glass, but less featured!” and “what a great way to announce that you’re a d-bag.” Haters gonna hate, as they say, and I’ll admit that the design is not my style. Still, there are reasons to believe Snapchat’s Spectacles will have the sort of wide consumer adoption that Google Glass never did:

Price. At less than one-tenth the price of Google Glass, it’s much more affordable. The price is in line with normal sunglasses, for those of us who don’t buy our sunglasses off the spinny rack at the drug store (full disclosure: I buy my sunglasses off the spinny rack at the drug store).
Branding. Oh sure, Google had great brand recognition when Glass launched. But Google’s brand is more about utility. Snapchat is about social. And this lines up well with the respective eyewear, but I think the fact that Snapchat is a social media platform, not a “know everything” platform helps in this case.
Obviousness. Both Google Glass and Spectacles are pretty obvious externally, but Spectacles will apparently have an LED light to indicate when it was recording. The fact that Spectacles are sunglasses, not a fixture on general-purpose glasses, means that some of the more obvious privacy concerns (particularly bathrooms) are avoided because people probably won’t be wearing them inside. Plus the limited duration shortens the window for privacy violations. It’s more “I have my camera ready to go” and less “I am recording your every move.”
Simplicity. Yes, Spectacles have very limited use, but that also means they’re really easy to use. I haven’t used Glass, so I can’t speak for the ease of use, but it’s hard to beat “push this button.”

None of this is any guarantee that Spectacles will be a success, of course. It will be interesting to see how this affects Snapchat usage. Anecdotally, while I have many friends of a variety of genders, ages, and interests on Snapchat, it’s a small group of mostly twenty-something women that post stories (perhaps there’s greater usage 1:1?). There’s a lot to be said for being able to share your experiences from your own point-of-view, so now we’ll have to see what Evan Spiegel and company can do.