@ijk "because it has things which are unreplicated and unreplicable elsewhere"

I'm especially curious about this part - what sort of things are you thinking of here?

@joepie91 No two social media platforms are directly equivalent, absent the exceptional and (thus far) unique case of Bluesky being created as an exact clone of Twitter and benefitting from Twitter collapsing like it did. The kind of social space possible on a platform is strongly, I would even say absolutely, determined by how the platform is structured, and I am endlessly perplexed by how people don't appreciate this.

The clearest example of what I mean is Discord. Discord is a groupchat aggregator; a Discord server is a collection of groupchats, and while there are fledgling forum mechanics, they are marginal and do not materially affect the definition of a Discord server as "a groupchat aggregator".

For this reason, I have never been able to meaningfully participate in a Discord server. I currently have access to a baker's dozen of them, and I am a true member of the community in none of them. I simply CANNOT keep up with multiple groupchats, and especially groupchats containing people I don't really know or don't know at all. I am in all of one (1) groupchat presently which I keep up with, and that's my family's groupchat where we talk about sport. That's it.

The effect, then, of a community moving to Discord, as so many of them do, is to exclude me – as surely as if they had used the software to ban my account – because the structure that supported the community I was part of has changed to the point that I can't be part of it any longer.

1/6

@joepie91 That's quite a dramatic example, but that's the kind of thing that's in play in *all* social media platforms. Facebook has a very strong forum structure; you leave a comment on a post, and then you get reactions and replies to that comment without needing to engage in the wider discussion, and the wider discussion doesn't recede with time or further engagement in the same way that a given message in a groupchat gets ever more buried by every subsequent message. On posts with a reasonable amount of discussion, it's easy to catch up on the whole thing, and any given thread of comments can be abandoned if it ceases to be interesting. It's modular and largely static in the sense I've described.

On the macro level, Facebook contains groups, which are subforums created and moderated by users, which allow discussion on the site to be siloed by subject, and then the group itself is siloed into individual topics which can be taken or left at leisure. Modularity and stasis again.

This is what gets lost when a group on Facebook "migrates to Discord", as a few have and many more are threatening to. The forum-ness is not replicated on Discord, and thus neither can the social space be.

2/6

@joepie91 Another example is Reddit. Reddit also has a very similar forum structure to Facebook – in fact, Reddit does it more strongly, in that subreddits are stronger siloes and comment threads can subbranch many more times than Facebook comments can – but it cannot replicate Facebook in the same way because (a) subreddits are public by default and Facebook groups are generally private by default and (b) Reddit is anonymous whereas on Facebook you tend to use your real name and a photo of yourself.

The effect this has on how socialisation happens on the two sites cannot be overstated. One of the main reasons that Reddit is known as a cesspit – I'm an avid user of it and *I* think it's a cesspit – is because the anonymity creates an environment in which people are complete cunts to each other all the time. The rudest people on the internet are Reddit users, and that's not because Reddit users form a special subset of internet users, it's because the *structure* of the site fosters that behaviour.

And the almost universally public nature of subreddits influences the discussions that are had in them to a degree that is no less powerful or important for being subtle. It's another thing which contributes to the impersonal nature of social interaction on Reddit, and which indirectly fosters cunty behaviour there.

3/6

@joepie91 Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky present special cases because the latter two were, to a greater or lesser extent, specifically designed to copy the structure of Twitter. But in aggregate, they present an entirely different structure to our previous three case studies. On here, all posts pool into a single feed per account, and there's no way to section off a particular set of accounts into their own forum in any way that's meaningfully analogous to a Facebook group or a subreddit. What few things come to mind are incredibly crude and have nothing like the formality (underratedly important) or discoverability of either groups or subreddits. Everyone speaks to everyone except where noted.

4/6

@joepie91 And then we get onto the actual people on each platform, which seems trivial, in that it's also not really consciously discussed in this kind of discourse, but people are what make social media *social*, and getting a large migration to happen, on the scale necessary to recreate a platform wholesale somewhere else, is an event so rare that it has literally happened only once in history.

The original platform being so comprehensively destroyed (like Musk destroyed Twitter) and the new platform almost exactly cloning the structure of the original (like Bluesky cloned Twitter) is really the only way to make this kind of migration work. That confluence of events has only ever happened once, and both of them NEED to happen for the process to work because the structure determines socialisation so strongly that an attempt to transplant a community (in however strict or loose a sense) from one structure to another inevitably entails mutating it beyond recognition and leaving large parts of it behind.

And it really is a matter of leaving people behind. If my favourite Facebook groups, my cherished groups, where I do most of my socialisation in a day (I'm autistic and struggle to do it irl), full of people I consider if not fully friends then more than mere acquaintances, shutter, then I'll go... nowhere. There'll be nowhere *to* go. They'll go somewhere, probably Discord, and they might as well start speaking to each other in Linear A for all that I'll be able to participate in those communities from then on.

5/6

@joepie91 And somebody – not you, but somebody – reading this is writing a comment right now explaining why, akchewally, this or that structural element *is* replicated on a different major platform, and they're going to use the word "just" at some point. No. Anyone using the word "just" or making such an argument in general in response to anything I've said is getting blocked. I'm not tolerating generic reply guy condescension over my actual life experiences and the very serious threats to what little socialisation I've found myself capable of in a day-to-day basis.

6/6