Of course you can be anybody on the Internet. (Or as the famous New Yorker cartoon said, “on the Internet, nobody knows you are a dog”). But in the early days of social media, the important thing was that you could actually be yourself on the Internet. You could be an expert on tanks of WWII or be interested in how to grow fungi in your bathtub or simply want to tell the world about a funny thing that happened on your way to work and you would find an audience. Nothing was too niche, nowhere was too lonely. Social media brought people together, it was a way to make friends, find followers and fans. And as it grew, it became a place where anything was possible. You could find a job through Twitter, or a partner on Facebook. It was a thing of wonder (“look, SRK is here!”) and delight (“look, SRK replied to my tweet OMG”).
The medium had the ability to change your life in an instant. There was chaos, of course, but largely the benefits outweighed the dangers. So much so that at one point it was clear that investing in your social media was an important activity. For journalists, Twitter was a tool that you could simply not work without; for those interested in the lifestyle categories, Facebook and later, Instagram, became must-own zones. The greater the following you amassed, the bigger your chances were at… everything. Everyone checked out your social media profiles — potential employers, potential in-laws, future best friends. And, let’s face it, a big following lent some immediate credibility.
The party is over
Now, it seems, all that work has come to nought. Twitter doesn’t exist any more. It has become X, a place that is unrecognisable from a few years ago. It has the energy of a bar when the party is over, the floor strewn with rubbish, the walls sprayed with graffiti. The really interesting crowd has left, and others are hanging on only because they don’t know where else to go yet. In the last couple of months, two other options popped up. Bluesky, a Twitter alternative that has been in the works for quite some time, expanded its user base and allowed more people in. But you still need an invite to get in. I have been on Bluesky for a few weeks now. But my early thrill about having snagged an invite has subsided into a quiet dread at having to start over. I have some 17 followers now and even though I told myself it’d be easy to just copy over everything I tweet, I haven’t been able to sustain it. Mostly, I just forget it’s there. Obviously, because there are so few followers, there is very little engagement on the content and so there is no back and forth, no smart replies, nothing. It’s just me squeaking into the void.
A couple of weeks after my Bluesky debut, Mark Zuckerberg-owned Meta launched Threads. By this time people were so desperate to find a Twitter-alternative that more than 100 million people signed up for Threads within a week of its launch. For a beat, it looked like this could be it. Threads is linked to Instagram so it was an easy way to port over your existing follower base on the app. I cursed myself for having spent the last decade shouting on Twitter instead of preening on Instagram and building a bigger base there. Nevertheless, my 800-or-so followers were better than the 17 on Bluesky and it felt like it was possible to pick up threads of existing conversations instead of creating new ones. But even that is looking challenging. I am not the only one. By most accounts, more than half the people who signed up haven’t been returning to the site.
Our readers will find us
What’s the future then? Are we forever condemned to live in a state of constant anxiety, ready at any moment to take our thoughts and ideas and friends and followers and move to another location? Is there nowhere that we can put down the roots of our social media existence and call home? Who knows? Just as I was pondering over the future of my virtual existence, a Twitter thread caught my eye. It was the writer Prem Panicker posting to say that he’d written a blog post about what was happening in Manipur. He wrote it, primarily, for himself and so he didn’t worry about adding a search engine optimised headline or promoting it on any social media platform. But to his surprise, a rather large number of readers found the piece, and when it resonated with them, they copied and pasted it on to WhatsApp and sent it around, until eventually it came to the attention of a couple of newspaper editors who wanted to carry it in their pages. This is a subversion of the usual process of virality, and although rare, it is heartening to know that another way is possible.
Perhaps we won’t have to worry about where we’ll take our readers. As long as there is meaning in what we are trying to say, our readers will find us. This might even mean that we be measured in what we say, and not air every flippant thought that comes to our mind. Or maybe it was just a fluke. Who can tell?
The writer is the author of ‘Independence Day: A People’s History’.
