Back when he was aggressively inserting himself in my feed, I just blocked him and never saw him ever again.

I did delete X this week though because there's been very little there I care about for quite some time that isn't also on Bluesky.

You forgot one of the best options: ignoring social media altogether.

This is true. For the most part I do.

But unfortunately I'm not aware of a better way to be in the academic/research community. Twitter and BlueSky are where the conversations are happening. These do more for paper discovery than things like Google Scholar, Semanitic Scholar, and elsewhere. Not to mention that posts tend to have additional context that is often left out of works, making it easier to bridge into topics that are not in my niche.

The other unfortunate part, is that I too have to advertise my own work and myself to the community. The work is not enough. There's an easy to observe strong correlation between the number of citations I get and the amount of publicity my works get, with the latter strongly influenced by the efforts of myself and others in the research team. Though recognizing this, it does enable me to find a lot of hidden gems. Works that are often rejected and unnoticed because they are not from big research teams.

So far the pros outweigh the cons, well... at least for BlueSky. I can't say the same about Twitter and I'd wish more people would move over. Smaller communities have a lot of advantages.

We need a modern equivalent for old school forums. They were full of people interested in a topic without a lot of noise from people who benefit from disrupting them.

I agree. I think we've made a terrible mistake and forgot something important: you can't make a product for everyone. As long as people are not uniformly distributed, then it means there is no real "center" point. On a random normal distribution, you can find a point that is minimizes the distance to all others, but that point will not be representative of the distribution itself. If you try to make something for everyone, you make something that is for no one. Instead, we then need to make environments. Places for others to build. This ends up being the only thing that can be for everyone.

Is that not the magic of the computer? You can build and make it your own? You can program it and make new creations? A computer is nothing without the programs and if programs could only be created by those with the means to make computers, we'd only have calculators. Is this not the magic of the internet? Where we can make new connections and build our own spaces and things inside this environment? If the building was limited to those who built the environment, would it be anything like it is today? Is this not the magic of the smartphone? Where we build apps and programs for others to use? If apps could only be developed by Apple and Google, would we even have a flashlight app?

It seems a mistake to close the doors, to board up the windows, and reinforce the walls. It is fear that causes us to do this, thinking we must seek control to maintain our "power." But even a king is benefited when the subjects are free to dream. The fear that giving up a little power will result in losing it all has only led to having less power in all.