We are currently in the midst of the biggest social media shakeup in more than a decade, which got me wondering where exactly my readers were spending their scrolling time these days. I also realized that as Twitter interactivity rates declined and I grew increasingly concerned about that platform’s overall direction, I needed to diversify and redefine Seattle Bike Blog’s social media presence. So for the past month, I have posted about nearly every Seattle Bike Blog story to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Instagram Reels, Mastodon, Post News, TikTok, Tumblr, Twitter and YouTube Shorts. Note that I started all of this before the recent meltdown at Reddit, but I was not a regular Reddit poster before and I didn’t start posting there as part of this experiment.

In order to accomplish all these postings, I made some rules for myself:

• I must spend some time on each platform attempting to find users who might be interested in Seattle Bike Blog and make an effort to use the appropriate tags.
• Because making a quality post for each platform takes a lot of work, I was allowed to do a crappy job so long as something got posted.
• I had to reply to comments (when needed) in as timely a manor as possible.
• No paying for exposure.

I want to be clear that this story is about using social media as a journalist who runs an independent news site. My goals are to engage with Seattle bike folks, find interesting local bike happenings and news, increase general awareness of our work and increase traffic to SeattleBikeBlog.com. So perhaps others would have a different experience on these platforms if they had different goals.

So how did it go?

Bluesky

I got an early invite to Bluesky from my mother, who wrote her 2012 Ph.D. dissertation on educators using social media (mostly Twitter IIRC) to engage with informal personal learning networks for professional development. Bluesky went through an intense hype bubble there for a bit, largely because it was invite-based and telling people they can’t have something often makes them want it more. But once inside, well, it’s not great. The hype-to-use ratio for Bluesky is huge. As I am writing this, it has been 13 days since a single post has received a like, reply or “reskeet” despite posting nearly every weekday. I think I have maybe three or so actual readers using the site regularly. I’m sure I could find a few more people if I spent more time trying to interact there, but the search function is terrible so I stopped trying. Maybe Bluesky will keep working on its moderation and search tools, and perhaps more people will join. But for now it’s mostly disappointing and quiet. So if you are sitting there wishing you had an invite, don’t worry. You’re not missing much.

Facebook

A few years back the service I was using to autopost stories to Facebook quietly stopped working, and I didn’t notice for six months. My use of Facebook soured a dozen or so years ago when they artificially lowered post views from commercial pages like Seattle Bike Blog unless we paid them money. Even people who followed Seattle Bike Blog wouldn’t necessarily see our posts unless I paid Facebook for the privilege. That’s when I mothballed the SBB Facebook page, setting up an autoposting bot and rarely ever logging in to check on it. Why would I spend my time trying to build an online audience and community on a service that might at any point decide they want to charge me to interact with the community I helped build? And, well, let’s just say that Facebook has not gotten better since then. The good news for me is that the number of people using it seems to have dropped dramatically, so I am missing out on fewer potential views now than I was a decade ago. That said, I do still get comments on Facebook posts, so it’s not totally dead yet.

Instagram

I have never liked Instagram for one big reason: You can’t link outside of Instagram! Well, you sort of can by placing a link “sticker” in your Stories. Stories in general still feels like a super clumsy feature, one of several blatant copycat features that make the whole service feels disjointed. Using Instagram feels like jumping over a series of unnecessary hurdles. “Link in bio,” writes almost anyone who has an online presence beyond Instagram. Why does everyone put up with this? It’s so user unfriendly. And Instagram has by far the most ads, and that’s not even counting all the the paid content within posts themselves that people don’t always disclose. These are all reasons why I have never invested time into building a Seattle Bike Blog Instagram presence until this past month.

But my qualms aside, it is undeniable that Instagram is where the people are. The response level once I started posting was immediate and significant. Even a post that is just a screenshot of text from the blog (another one of those clumsy workarounds) often gets a bunch of likes and mentions. But even more tangible, people in real life will tell me about how they noticed me posting on Instagram. No other social media site on this list has had this effect.

Instagram Reels

OK, I know Reels isn’t exactly its own platform, but my thoughts on it are different from the rest of Instagram so I’m giving it its own section. This has got to be the biggest surprise of my whole social media experiment: Instagram Reels are kind of good actually. I did not want to like Reels. Just another copycat feature pasted into Instagram, like Stories was copied from Snapchat. How uncreative. I also didn’t want to like Reels because it has the same annoying no links problem that Instagram posts have. And of course I don’t trust Meta. So Reels had everything stacked against it, but I still kinda like it. I enjoyed making short-form videos more than I expected, and the response was larger than I expected. And though TikTok clearly set this trend (we’ll get to them), Reels seems better at reaching people in Seattle who are into biking because they go to our existing follower bases on both Instagram and Facebook. The app for creating Reels is also much better than TikTok’s, at least for what I’m trying to do (and lol the YouTube Shorts creator app is a joke in comparison to the other two).

I started off by totally phoning it in, just recording myself talking while green screened in front of a screenshot of a blog post. And it worked. It’s also an interesting little challenge to force myself to summarize or at least comment on a story I just wrote in 15 seconds or less (you can go longer than 15 if you want, but TikTok and Reels both seem to like 15-second videos and they play better with Stories). I also upload copies of my Reels to the blog sidebar if you want to watch but are not on Instagram or TikTok. So I can say that I got something positive out of making 15-second shorts for each post, and I’ll keep doing it.

Mastodon

It won’t come as a surprise to regular readers that I love Mastodon. It’s ad-free and straightforward. You follow accounts, and then you can see posts from those accounts in the order they posted them. You can also follow a hashtag to see any post with that tag in your feed as well. And there is a constantly-growing number of other types of accounts you can follow in your feed even if they aren’t on Mastodon. Any “federated” platform using the ActivityPub protocol can interact directly with Mastodon, with varying levels of ease and functionality. It’s definitely all a work in progress, but it’s great when it works well. It’s the philosophical opposite of the “walled garden” platforms like Instagram and TikTok that do all they can to prevent users from interacting with other platforms.

Mastodon does not have a commercial interest in increasing user eyeball time, etc, so it is not full of dopamine tricks that all the commercial platforms use to keep you staring at your feed as long as possible. It did take time and effort to build up a feed full of people I’m interested as well as to build a following. The search functions can also make it harder than necessary to find accounts you want to follow or to follow conversations about a major current event. But it has a large user base, and there’s a healthy Seattle-based community. I have moved the majority of Seattle Bike Blog’s short-form writings to the Mastodon account, and you can find recent posts on the blog’s sidebar if you are not a Mastodon user. I am still exploring ideas for how to better integrate short-form posts into the site.

At this point, our Mastodon account gets about as much response as the Twitter account, where I had invested a lot of time and energy over the past dozen years. If you’re a Seattle Bike Blog reader looking for a Mastodon server to join, check out social.ridetrans.it (which is Seattle-based) or social.seattle.wa.us. I have been using both and they are both great.

Post.News

I received two likes on posts in the past month. That said, it is very easy to just copy-paste posts from Mastodon to Post.News, so maybe I’ll keep doing it? I dunno. I’m also not sure it’s really a social network even though it looks like one. I could see people using it like a lo-fi news aggregator so they can see news links in a single self-curated feed, but I have no idea if the people who run Post.News want it to be just a simple news headline service.

TikTok

Oh boy, TikTok. From my month-long experiment, this is hands down the most toxic social media platform on this list. Yes, even more toxic than Twitter. TikTok comments feel like YouTube comments from back in the day. I have gotten a bunch of ignorant comments, but I’ve also witnessed much meaner ones on others’ posts. I really hope young people making videos aren’t taking this stuff too hard. I guess there are people who just flip through videos and lay into everyone they see.

TikTok seems to have learned all the worst lessons from other social media services. Just like Instagram, TikTok does not let you post links, which dramatically reduces the appeal for my use case. And it utilizes more dopamine tricks than any other service, coming off as almost desperate to keep you looking at it as long as possible. TikTok’s algorithm is much more likely to show you weird stuff than Reels, which could be a pro or con. Honestly, I can’t stand the feeds from either of them. It often feels like a stream of confident dudes yelling at you about something (TikTok in particular boosts the audio volume so even calm talking sounds like yelling). This is probably just my subjective preference. I’ll keep posting there, but it will probably just be re-uploads of Reels since I like the Reels video creator app better.

Tumblr

I really phoned it in on Tumblr, and it shows. I did post links and used the #SEAbikes and #Seattle tags, but I have had absolutely no interaction at all. I was not easily able to find a Seattle biking scene there, though I must admit that I did not try too hard to foster one.

Twitter

I invested an enormous amount of time and energy into the @SeaBikeBlog Twitter account, which has 14,400 “followers,” down from a high above 15,000. However, the vast majority of those follower accounts have been abandoned at this point. There are still a lot of people using the site, and there are still a bunch of newsworthy accounts that only post there. But it’s a shell of what it once was, and the future only looks bleak. I have given up hope for Twitter, which was honestly difficult to do after putting so much work into it. There were times when the SBB Twitter account felt more effective than the blog itself. But those days are behind us. I’ll keep posting headlines and checking in, but I’ll invest my time and energy elsewhere.

YouTube Shorts

YouTube Shorts is a very lazy implementation of a TikTok-style short-form video service. And the Shorts creator in the YouTube app is vastly inferior to the TikTok and Reels versions. But Shorts get views, and they help reach our YouTube monetization goals, so I’ll keep posting them.

Conclusion

Since finishing work on my book (due out in August!), I have reinvested myself in SeattleBikeBlog.com itself. I’m trying to make sure the work I do ends up on the site in addition to social media platforms. We are seeing what happens when a profit motive takes hold inside companies built on community-created content and networks, and it is ugly. You get these greedy corporate dudes who convince themselves that they own work that actually belongs to their users. They forget that 100% of the value of their companies comes from the same people they are trying to squeeze. My overall goal with social media is to use it to the extent that the platform helps Seattle Bike Blog, but I will resist becoming reliant on any corporate social media service.

Is there a platform you use where you would like to see more from Seattle Bike Blog? Let us know in the comments below. Thank you all for reading and for supporting fully independent Seattle bike journalism.