Social media practice review, January 2025
Goodbye(ish), Twitter.
For some years now I take a look at my own use of social media sometime near the end or start of the year and sometime near the middle of the year. In these social media practice reviews I try to describe what I do with social media, consider why I do so, evaluate my reasons, and articulate my own criteria for good practice. My most recent previous review was in July 2024.
For the past few years I have been active on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Last year I added Discord and Substack and realized that WhatsApp functions as a small scale social medium for me.
I will start with Twitter (X, if we must) because this is the social medium in which my practice has changed the most over the past six months. Some of the people whose contributions I appreciated and enjoyed most on Twitter (mainly on my personal list of accounts that inform or affirm my Anglican Christian faith practice, titled Common Worship) left the platform over the past year. Some of them joined Bluesky. I find myself lacking the motivation to continue using Twitter regularly and lacking any desire to join Bluesky.
I won’t leave Twitter, but apart from retweeting tweets from my work I will probably only use it again when next a major election happens in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, South Africa, or the USA. For the past few years I curated a Twitter list of people who provided news and opinion from which I could learn for each major election in which I had an interest, and those lists provided me with real insights as well as leads to relevant podcasts. I am not sure that Twitter will continue to be useful to me in this way in the future, but I will wait and see when the opportunity next arises.
During 2024 I added a Twitter account to inform my prayer practice, that of Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED), an independent, impartial, international NGO collecting data on violent conflict and protests globally. It turns out ACLED also has a Facebook presence, and that is where I will turn for this information in the future.
Instead of tracking Anglican conversations on a fairly large scale on Twitter (there are more than 700 accounts on my Common Worship list), I will try and connect with a much smaller number of people relevant to my faith practice more deeply with Facebook, Substack, and personal conversations.
Here are my new criteria for my own minimal future social media practice on Twitter:
I retweet tweets from my work.
I curate personal lists of relevant accounts during elections in which I have an interest and use those lists to source insightful commentary in other media.
Beyond the above I attend to nothing on Twitter.
My use of Instagram over the past six months has again looked quite similar to what it did in the previous twelve months, consisting mostly of looking at the posts and stories of family and friends and posts about gardens in England and America and about hiking in the Dolomites.
My use of Instagram is otherwise less carefully curated than my use of Facebook and Twitter, although I limit myself to looking at the posts of accounts I follow, ignoring the contents of the feed the platform proposes to me. My own posting on Instagram remains infrequent, as the birth of my grandchildren shifted my sharing of my own photographs more to family groups on WhatsApp.
I have changed my Instagram account from public to private, which means that it is only available to people who follow the account. As with Facebook, I no longer accept follow requests from accounts I don’t follow or from people with whom I have not had a conversation in the preceding year.
I continue to enjoy sharing the music to which I listen on Spotify while working in my Instagram stories. I now automatically forward all my posts and stories on Instagram to Facebook.
My criteria for my own social media practice on Instagram remains what they were in July 2024:
Beyond the posts and stories of family I limit my attention on Instagram to beautiful pictures, mostly of gardens and mountain hiking paths.
My own Instagram posts celebrates significant family, church, and school events, significant feasts in the Anglican church year, the flowers Danielle and I buy for our apartment, and the Seasons of Yggi, the tree outside our living room window.
I look at Instagram whenever I want the lift of a little beauty, and it almost always leaves me a little more delighted and a little more courageous.
My use of Facebook over the past six months has looked very similar to what it did in the previous twelve months. I interact with my family (who are spread around the world—currently in South Africa, New Zealand, and Canada) and celebrate significant family events such as birthdays, baptisms, weddings, and the commemoration of deaths. I interact with members of my church (my local parish, the Anglican Dominican religious order, and a selection of folks from the worldwide Anglican Communio). And I promote courses taught at my school (the Institute for Christian Studies, an interdisciplinary graduate school where the gospel's message of renewal shapes our pursuit of wisdom, based in Toronto). I continue to belong to Facebook groups organized around three of my interests (boardgames, morning prayer, and hiking in the Dolomites) although my attention to those groups is very low key. I had to leave a group of people who care about evensong in the Anglican tradition because it had become to acrimonious.
My primary reason at present for using Facebook as I do remains that I want to maintain connections with family and church folks in between the opportunities we have to be together on site. In the case of my family, I only get to be in the same place as my mother, my siblings and their spouses, and my cousins, nieces, and nephews every 18 to 24 months, and our rather frequent sharing of pictures and words on Facebook allow us to have a bit of a sense of one another’s lives. We also use WhatsApp to share more privately and, with varying degrees of frequency, use online video platforms to visit. My posting of courses from my school is intended to amplify the efforts of my colleagues who help the right students to find us. I continue to think that these are good reasons for using Facebook and that limiting my use of the platform to these uses protects me from the worst of the damage that the medium has inflicted on the world.
Here are my criteria for my own social media practice on Facebook:
I try to limit my Facebook friending to people with whom I have a direct personal connection through these three communities: family, church, and school. The rare exceptions are personal friends from my childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood. I think of my personal Facebook page as a kind of virtual kitchen table, surrounded by people I know (or would be happy to know) off Facebook.
I mostly limit my posting to the celebration of significant events in these three communities: family, church, and school. I don’t keep my posts private, but I don’t post for the attention of people with whom I am not friended on Facebook. I avoid controversy on Facebook, not because I am adverse to difficult conversations, but because I prefer to have such conversations verbally rather than in print or by means of correspondence.
I limit the time I invest in Facebook to a few random minutes outside of working hours each day, which allows me to keep up with what the folks in my family, church, and school communities post.
Discord
I continue to use Discord only to nurture academic community at my school. The primary way in which I do this is to use the video lounge once a week on Friday mornings to be present with colleagues (mainly graduate students) as we do our academic writing.
Substack
I have not been able to make Substack as much a part of my social media practice as I had imagined in July 2024 that I might, so I don’t really have a good sense of how I might want to use it in the future.