What I’m doing with social media and related platforms in late 2025

Recently several people have asked me how I currently use social media.  It’s a good question, as it hits on politics, technology, and personal practices, so I thought I’d share my experience here in this post-Halloween week.  Writer Warren Ellis recommends we share our tools and practices, and perhaps that’s a good idea. I also want to aim this post at the Reclaim Open 2025 conference, with its focus on blogging.  Hello, Reclaimers!

Here I’m going to focus on what I do with the stuff, personally and practically.  I’m not going to get into media criticism or reflection on broader issues of technological analysis.

Generally, I use a good amount of social media for a range of purposes.  Professionally, I discover new ideas, have conversations, and learn from various folks.  From a futurist’s point of view the socials give me a quick way to scan for topics and languages of a given moment, helping me peer into emerging phenomena. Personally I keep in touch with a lot of friends from various times and parts of my life.

Social media users in millions. 2025, Statista.

To be fair, all of these reasons are firmly grounded in years of practice and were widely known back in the Web 2.0 days.  What changes for me is largely details of platforms and interactions with participants. I shift my behavior as a given system changes how it operates. For example, I learned not to share URLs in Facebook or Instagram posts, as those platforms stupidly dislike links. Instead, I add them to comments immediately after making a post.  As for people, every week sees me adding or cutting follows, depending on all kinds of details: if a person stops posting, or shifts their topics to ones I’m not interested in, I’ll drop them. I follow new people as I find them, sometimes based on recommendations.

Which platforms do I use now?  Blogging remains central to my work.  I try to post on my site twice a week, but my 2025 schedule has made that a challenge.  As usual, the record of posts reveals shifting interests. Over the past two years I’ve been writing more about politics as well as cuts to academic institutions, alas.  My book writing intertwines with my blogging.  The new book, Peak Higher Ed (due out this winter from Johns Hopkins) sprang from a 2013 blog post.  I shared research for my previous book, Universities on Fire (2023), on the blog, posting about climate change and the academy.  Notes for two new book projects, on webinars and on ideologies of the future, keep appearing here as I noodle on them.  This writing lets me test out ideas and research, eliciting feedback, and also pegging each item to the public web for later use.

Formally these blog posts keep getting longer, despite my best efforts.  I’ve always tried to add images to the walls of text; now I’ve been sharing more of my photography on the blog (for example).  Otherwise I hunt for images on Flickr, hoping for Creative Commons-licensed pictures to use. (for more on Flickr, see below)

I love comments and cherish each person who writes here, but their frequency has been declining, especially when I post about climate change or politics.  This is probably due to the blogosphere’s decline in favor of newer platforms.  Or it might be my recent interests have shifted away from my audiences’.   Alternatively, people do read the site (top posts get thousands of clicks) but don’t feel like commenting.

Beyond the blog, I carry its posts over to my Medium site, which tends to be a bit quieter. I haven’t found much Medium writing about academia, so I’m pleasantly surprised when my posts about that world get noticed.  Interestingly, my future oriented materials somedays win a lot more notice.  I should write more frequently on this.

As a reader, I consume many blogs, usually through an Inoreader RSS account. I subscribe to too many and usually fall behind, but love the ease of keeping up with so many thinkers.  I can also track ideas and stories as they move across multiple blogs.  I make a point of following people on opposite sides of issues where I can – for example, folders for political writers on the left and those on the right.

What other social media do I use?  Let’s pair up opposites.

I headed to Bluesky when it launched and it’s now my Twitter replacement.  It’s where I share quick thoughts and links and scroll through some accounts of interest.  The trending keywords/phrases are sometimes a neat snapshot of global news, albeit mostly through a left/liberal filter.   On the other hand, I still post and read at X/Twitter.  The number of people I follow had dropped greatly since Musk bought and renamed it, but there are still enough there that it’s worth my time.  As with Bluesky, X can be a useful snapshot tool, if tending to be through a filter which is partly (but not entirely) conservative, partly sports crazed, ditto bitcoin.

I returned to Mastodon and gradually got some joy out of it, although it took many efforts, switching from server to server, and recalibrating my expectations to a much lower setting.  It’s a good way to converse with some friends and colleagues, mostly in the educational technology/OER/progressive space.  It’s too idiosyncratic to serve as a trend tracker.  On the other hand, I’ve been trying to increase my LinkedIn time.  Conversations there also include ed tech but extend to other aspects of college and university operations.  It’s a decent way to connect with colleagues, as designed.

With a mixture of sadness, self-awareness, and some honest pleasure I report that Facebook is where I experience by far the greatest number of interactions with other people.  It’s a very flawed place, of course. The main page feed manages to block all kinds of things, including major life events and some but not all political posts.  I despite Facebook’s resistance to the humble URL. But some of the groups I’m in are genuinely rewarding. Some of my posts get dozens, then hundreds of comments from people, and I similarly enjoying comments on others’ posts.  At times it’s like the BBSes of old.

As with my RSS habit, I make a point of maintaining a broad Facebook church. Folks in my orbits there are from a staggering variety of political positions: sitting city mayors, anarchists, Greens, nationalists, antiracists, libertarians, feminists, Democrats, Republicans, gun owners, anti-gun activists, and I think a few monarchists, not to mention others.

Facebook does have issues with my professional work. It’s hard to share my research and whatever I make of it (videos, live events, articles) most of the time. The platform seems to think I’m a commentator about politics, food, technology, culture, and cats.

Facebook’s sibling Instagram isn’t one I have much success with, although I keep at it.  I enjoy some of my follows, between friends, some art accounts, and some comedy ones. I try to post every day or two, but there’s little traction unless I share photos of my hairy and disturbing self, so perhaps I should turn my Insta-work more towards the autobiographical.

Let’s push the social media boundary a bit.  Beyond these famous platforms, where else do we digitally socialize?

I would consider Goodreads to be such a place.  Mostly I use it to share notes on what I’m reading, jotting down impressions and quotes somewhat in the commonplace book style.  I enjoy some friends’ reviews.  Similarly, I’ve recently taken to posting movie reviews at Letterboxd, although I haven’t gotten fully into the habit of doing so just yet.

I continue to use some classic Web 2.0 tools.  I post photos to Flickr, which I find a fine place for displaying and organizing images, although I rarely hear from other users there.  Similarly I post URLs to social bookmarking sites Pinboard and Diigo, both of which are very useful.  I regularly turn to them for links I’ve stashed there.

Reddit strikes me as social media, and I use it somewhat.  There are a string of groups I follow for multiple interests, but I don’t post much.  I’m unusually consumer-oriented in that space.  Mostly Reddit falls behind for me as not as high a priority as the others.

Do we include email newsletters as social media, despite email predating Web 2.0 by a generation?  If so, that world has taken off and I’m along for the ride.  I follow a staggering amount of newsletters, mostly published via Substack, along with a series of others, all across a wide range of topics: academia, climate change, progressive politics, journalism, movie reviews, etc.  I write one now, AI, Academia, and the Future, which is where nearly all of my AI and robotics research goes. That’s become a valuable place for me, professionally.  I can share what I’m working on, get feedback, and make connections with a growing audience.  Some of subscribers actually pay for the privilege, for which I’m very grateful. As an independent academic, this helps keep me going.

Beyond emails, if we include video as social media, then YouTube is where I spend increasing amounts of time.  As a user this is where I get the lion’s share of my music, thanks to my eclectic tastes.  It’s also where I follow some creators, some professional and others connecting to different parts of my life (cooking, humor, politics, weirdness).  I archive tons of playlists for many reasons.  The Future Trends Forum archive just passed 457 recordings.  Since February I’ve been vlogging about the Trump administration’s campaign against higher ed.  I add other videos, too, trying to offer more about the future and some of my ideas.  YouTube finally monetized my channel, so this work is starting to pay off, literally.

This might seem like a lot, so for a desperate attempt at balance I’ll mention social media platform I’m not using.  I tried Threads (which always makes me think of this) for a few years but it never worked for any of my purposes.  I’ve never found Pinterest something I could do.  And Tiktok, well, my students ask me to make stuff there and I do admire the elegance of its video editor, but I dislike the feed structure and keep getting appalled by what I find therein.

Beyond social media, I’m also fairly active with several messaging platforms.  I have daily conversations on Signal and Telegram with various friends and groups, plus Discord, when I remember it.  As an American I keep forgetting to use Whatsapp, to the amusement of people who live everywhere else in the world.  As a bad American I’m not a Slack user – I keep forgetting to fire it up and get so little reinforcement for it elsewhere. These venues are good for various degrees and expectations of privacy, as well as for the traditional benefits of chat: quick and informal conversations.

Stepping back, what to make of all of this digital stuff?

Overall, what I’m currently doing has value for me. As you saw above, these various combinations of venues, following, and creating bring professional and personal benefits.  The connections, done right, work for me.  It’s worth the investment in time and thinking.

Generally, there’s a lot of segmentation. I see different people in each social media platform. There isn’t much overlap, although a few friends – hello George Station and Alan Levine – will sometimes greet me on a couple on the same day. Generally, each one is a different space: a separate audience, a different rhetorical situation.  I sometimes cross-post, but adjust each iteration to the individual context. I don’t often share what I’m doing in one venue with another, except with blogging and Substack; honestly, I don’t know if that connects with significantly more people.

That segmentation isn’t something I bridge with any application.  None suits me for that purpose now, so I have a socials tab cluster on each browser, and a socials screen on my phone.

As part of my practice I regularly adjust parts of these networks.  I add, delete, or adjust the position of follows, as mentioned earlier, as they and/or I change.  I reorganize how it all works: adding folders if possible, changing up playlists, altering the sequence of a list, and so on. I try to streamline each experience. This seems like an underappreciated part of social media life, but it’s essential, I think, especially when one’s feeds become unpleasant or stale.

I don’t follow celebrities, although some of the people I track have different degrees of fame.  This is a major use of social media and yet it’s never worked for me. I’ve never been bitten by the celebrity culture bug, nor do I feel myself having any parasocial relationships. I prefer to follow people I know or whose work I respect.

One more thought: it seems like I lean into some of these socials for interaction with other people, and others for noninteractive posting – storage, really.  I’m not sure if there’s a name for that second category, but it works for me for now.

What do you make of this account, readers?  Are there platforms I should dive into or give up on?  Any practices you’d suggest?