## 02 My Network to divide them !

Remember the beginning of social networks... The idea was to create groups, to unite people, to meet other people, relationship of your close friends, etc...No don't laugh, it was a good marketing and we have all played with that once in our lifetime. Now, our social networks are quite different from the beginning :
* Facebook is for adults, older adults and sometimes for small businesses to have a free homepage.
* Twitter has become X and is for ...friends of Elon Musk
* TikTok is for younger people and small-video oriented
* Youtube is a crossover between social Network and Television.
* Bluesky is recreating exactly what was Twitter.
* Mastodon and the Fediverse are something else that many people don't understand on purpose.
* Twitch was for gamer and now is for everything with streaming.
* Threads and Instagram are for young adults and people who don't like words.
* ...STOP

I could add lines and lines of social networks. We are divided into many of them, dividing our time between them for a few illusions. The aim of many of them is to grab your interest, take your precious time and put advertising under your eyes, while hijacking your data. For me there are only two categories: Good and bad, evil or not... truly decentralised and others. Diaspora, now Mastodon instances, or Pixelfed, Lemmy, etc... are not commercial and that makes a big difference. Paradoxically, the more decentralized it is, the more you feel like you're part of a community. On the contrary, if you're centralised in a big network, you create your own bubble or chapel and close the doors to what you feel is the enemy. This was recently the first reflex of users coming from X to Bluesky. I use a ban list and I really don't know what I'm doing on Bluesky because it's the Twitter of 10 years ago. It's really starting to be the same with big companies, with advertising, with paid content... I don't need that and I
don't want that.

I feel good in the fediverse, even if it's a big bunch of leftist and alternative geek people (who said ..like me !?). Every network has a goal today. The problem is that sometimes you don't have a goal of your own. I'm learning and reading some interesting things in the Fediverse. I don't do that in X, Bluesky or many other networks today. In my different interests in life or at the moment, I try to divide it in different networks, for example retro-gaming is becoming very commercial and it's maybe more interesting in Bluesky than in Mastodon. But for a more technical subject, it's more interesting in the Fediverse. At least because of the character limit, ah ah. And the diversity in the instance helps to reunite some communities. Someone said that the friends of my friends are my friends and the enemies of my enemies are my enemies... Not bad, because most people are the enemies of the enemies of freedom, of woke opinion, etc.

But in these networks of the ephemeral, the quickly written, there are links to documents, blogs, newspapers, etc. Who reads these links? I'm pretty sure that X users don't read them. I had statistics before... It seems to be the same with Bluesky and Instagram. I know that some people read and see the links I put in the Fediverse, even if I don't use enough tags, I don't have many followers (I don't even know how many). HTML and the original web were successful because of hyperlinks. I don't even know if a young user of today will understand a website from the 90s and use the Ctrl key to open it in a new tab. New generation, new usages?

Social networks have changed with their users. After the X and Y generations, it's the Z generation and the way they see the world. I see it as a more egocentric use than ever before, but maybe I'm wrong. With the use of meeting apps and other ways to meet people, social networks are no longer social. It's just a communication tool like any other. And now communication is not a tool to bring people together, but to classify people into marketing categories. So I'm not very optimistic when I see how quickly Bluesky is changing. Threads and Instagram are not much different from what I hear. Forums are still asleep, but when I see how Reddit works, Lemmy, it's not so far from the very old tools to be... united on a subject. Life is made up of cycles.

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