Gideon: I think it’s so much work to get started on a new platform, you know, to follow people and figure out what I want to prioritize and post stuff there. Uh, so I can’t really say I used them. I tinkered, but that’s about it.
Lawrence: Yes. My workflow is now me, I publish a story or a podcast on WIRED. I open Twitter, I share it, and then I think: where is my Bluesky login again? And then I do. And I’m like, oh, right, T2, where I think I’ve got, you know, four followers and I do that and then I make something for Mastodon, which is great. But then you have to poke around a bit to find people’s Mastodon handles, because people can be on different servers. And then I share that. And then, uh, then I go to Instagram and share that.
Gideon: And then it’s time to eat. And I’m like, oh, I could have written another story today, but actually I just posted half an hour on social media.
Lawrence: I admit this to my boss. Yes. And then, and then I thought, did that really — how many more people saw it? I mean, how many, how many have I reached, how many people have I reached? Did this spark a conversation about something?
Gideon: OK. But what differences, if any, do you notice between these platforms? Or do they all feel like sort of pale Twitter replacements at this point?
Lawrence: The last. Hmm, that last one. They are a bit janky. They are not that easy to use. And uh—
Gideon: Twitter is also pretty janky right now.
Lawrence: Twitter is pretty janky right now. Bluesky is a lot like Twitter, which is nice. It has – it feels like a warm bath, familiar interface. You’re like, oh, I know how this thing works, but sometimes it doesn’t work the way you expect. There aren’t that many people there at the moment as it’s invitation only at the moment. So you don’t really feel like you’re reaching critical mass. I think back to how Twitter I was in the early 2010s as a journalist and as a writer, and really, really how wonderful it could be at times. And I don’t feel like I’ve been able to replicate that feeling on any of these platforms, but I’m also an older, wiser person on the internet.
Gideon: Is there a day on Twitter that you remember, Lauren? Like you’re the pinnacle of what it was all about.
Lawrence: I actually have such a nice random memory of — I’m pretty sure it was 2011. It was a long weekend. It was a holiday weekend and I didn’t have much plans so I was bored. I was living in New York at the time and I went on Twitter and I shared this, uh, really cute cartoon that our colleagues at The New Yorker did about a kid going back to school after summer break and asking the teacher, or someone asking , like, what did you do this summer? And the guy who actually said, I spent my summer on Twitter. And so I shared it on Twitter and then walked away from it and then the tweet exploded. And that was maybe my first experience of having a Twitter of sorts, a tweet that went viral. Yes. Yes. And I looked to see why that happened and it was because – this is so random: the Fonz had retweeted me.
