Social Media as a Spaced Repetition System

We know already about the addictive mechanics baked into many of the places we spend our time online. But what if I told you that curation of your feeds can also passively drill knowledge into you? What if I told you that it gave me an entire career path?

This had initially started with TV (I won't date myself here with specifics), but I kept a media feed in college that fueled a lot of my early DIY streak, from initial Linux experiments to my first system build to a lot of open-source tools I then used at work in tech support contexts. At the time, it was mostly made up of blogs, and leveraged RSS to keep track of them.

Some of them still exist. Most have changed hands a few times. Some of them changed hands because of Hulk Hogan specifically. The point is I'm not necessarily following most of the same sources -- the existence and quality and paywalls of places on the Internet that I've loved have varied over the years -- but simply making a point to curate useful places to find things can pay dividends that are hard to really quantify.

The RSS thing turned into a sort of inbox-zero problem, and I haven't quite circled back around to finding quite the right tool for me for managing those. (I have just circled back to using Thunderbird -- which is fine, though I haven't cared to setup anything with mobile sync.) But I've continued to find the overall habit useful, in ways I've at least partially been able to outsource to other forms of social media.

That's the whole thesis statement, really. That sometimes the answer to having a broad knowledge set about a subject matter is to scroll through feeds about it and have discussions with other like-minded people on the Internet. Incessantly. Until the language they're speaking has become a second nature to you. You do have to be careful about how, because every community will have its biases, but it's a useful way of passively immersing yourself in a topic -- its parlance, how it develops over time, and not just the technologies but the discourse around them. RTFM might itself be common around old tech culture, but now the communities themselves might just give you a Wiki.

Backlinks, related posts, and tags on an existing blog can provide you with useful context to dig through -- sort of like a Wiki Walk, Obsidian vault, what have you. Follow the same spaces long enough and the terminology will begin making sense on its own, but well-organized ones will often do a lot of the work for you.

Just about anyone reading this who's worked with technology before will have at least a story about a Google search that led them to a device- or software-specific forum. Vendors have them. Modding communities have them... And then there are places like Reddit.

There's a saying from /r/LifeProTips:

The real LPT is in the comments.

And it's a little like Cunningham's Law -- the fastest way to get the answer is to post the wrong answer and wait for someone to correct you -- but more... collaborative. Depending on where you spend your time and attention, you can find not only meaningful topical discussion but a lot of useful tools -- not just as top level posts, but in the discussion related to them.

Some examples for me (not necessarily limited to here) have included:

They're of course not the only community like this -- link aggregators have long existed, with and without groups. Hacker News is on my own follow list, I've heard decent things about lobste.rs even if I don't hang out there much, and there have of course been others that deteriorated over time. But Reddit has always felt a little like the concept of forums applied to the social media erea -- forums as I used to experience them tended to be at least centered around some kind of community, and not quite so generalized, but Reddit is broad enough that /r/TheresARedditForThat. I might hate what's happened to Reddit in the name of chasing profit, but there's value to the idea of being able to simply curate a front page of your own followed feeds. (At least, there was. I haven't logged in since they hobbled third-party clients.)

There's enough value being able to curate them, over a profit-driven algorithm doing it for you, that at least some of Reddit's userbase has fragmented off to Lemmy since some of Reddit's more drastic changes. Lemmy is a similar platform built on ActivityPub, the same protocol that powers Mastodon -- which enables smaller to operate in a networked fashion, whether they're more generalized (lemmy.world), or more topical (startrek.website, programming.dev).

The idea, in brief, is that you can setup one main "home" instance and then use it to browse various others. Sort of like how users across email providers can all message each other. And there are both other takes on social spaces we've seen (like photo/video sharing platforms), and support being built into spaces like blogging platforms (like WordPress and Ghost) that were previously self-contained.

But network effect is a feature, and it's hard to find one home on the Fediverse, as it's called, due to fragmentation issues. It encompasses a variety of different platforms with different extensions in order to functionally implement the model of, say, a Reddit clone -- so within it, it can still be difficult to get a good picture of the interop situation between, say, Mastodon and Lemmy (or, pick any other combination).

Which brings me to Bluesky. Bluesky also offers customized curation -- you can make or follow specific feeds containing groups of users, in ways that are topic- and community- focused. You also aren't limited to Bluesky itself -- the platform is built on a spec called the AT Protocol (or ATProto), and the core team actively encourages building alternatives that don't require their network. For instance, check out the feeds for Paul Frazee, their CTO or Mike Masnick, board member and original author of the Protocols, Not Platforms piece that inspired Bluesky's creation. You'll find all sorts of reshared projects around alternative apps and infrastructure. They've even started the process of contributing the spec to the IETF, noting "We want AT to have a neutral long-term home," and "importantly, the IETF cares about both the decentralization of the internet while also keeping it functioning well in practice." (ActivityPub, for its part, is a W3C project.)

Now I say "alternative infrastructure" -- while ActivityPub is more like a loose network of social platforms, ATProto is built around what are called Personal Data Servers. These can be hosted on a service (like Bluesky), or on your own hosting and domain. Instead of the whole model requiring users on networked hubs, on ATProto every user's content and other profile details are shared on what's loosely analogous to a website.

Rather than hosting every user on the network, ATProto apps instead essentially scan the Internet for servers that are sharing these feeds, and then expose that data to an application view -- which can then interact with the "website" as you interact with the application. So your PDS can host content from Bluesky and other applications alike, and new applications can access and use your existing profile data in addition to storing their own activity.

Which, for one thing, means that in the event that -- for instance -- Bluesky the company were ever to be acquired by some billionaire narcissist, you would have the escape hatch of being able to just take your data and move it somewhere else.

There are other, community-focused implementations of the whole Bluesky stack, like Blacksky and Northsky, alternative clients/hosts like Witchsky, and more -- with both the first- and third-party sides experimenting with everything from chat integrations to extended mod tools to payments. But like with ActivityPub, it extends a lot further belond all that -- to things like media review apps, code hosting, website hosting, social bookmarks and more. There are so many different solutions for longer-form blogging that those are standardizing now too. Dan Abramov (who worked at Bluesky for a stretch) has a deeper writeup of all of this -- it contains links to several such projects, that can interact with each other and don't all have to live in a silo. (The article itself being from a few months ago, I've tried to include a couple that weren't mentioned there/didn't exist yet.) The article being a few months old, I've tried to link to a few that aren't there. Network effect is still a feature, but ATProto aims to make it a feature that brings you into the network as someone building on it, rather than putting the whole thing behind a tollbooth or even locking out competing entities entirely.

An active and directed social media feed will turn a lot of the same threads up if you're focused on specific niches, regardless of your medium. But "feeds" can be minimal here. If you want something more passive, there are always newsletters. They're also a good, low-risk way to take a run at content writing -- as a way to build a professional profile and show off your knowledge set, and an excuse to dive further into a topic. (I for one tend to go on link walks as I write these.)

This also isn't limited to text content. It isn't hard to flood your YouTube recommendations with technology content even if there isn't a great, decentralized alternative to that (yet). Depending on who you're watching, you may also be able to find their feeds in a podcast, Podcasts are great for this sort of thing -- and, themselves being built on RSS feeds, have been decentralized the whole time. (Video podcasts don't appear to be as easy to find in this format, that being said.) Anil Dash noted not too long ago that “'Wherever you get your podcasts' is a radical statement" and envisioned a future of "wherever you get your news." And that's starting to look at least a little possible again, but on a certain level always has been.

Social media can be a plague, for all sorts of reasons. I could go on an entire separate rant about how it's consumed the messaging space, to use our DMs as a form of ecosystem lock-in. (But it's also a whole research dive about MLS and interoperability that I don't have the time and energy for right now.) And our feeds have, similarly, been hijacked for the sake of fostering addiction and pushing us into ragebait. Even without that, it's worth looking into what echo chambers you might have happened into through your Internet wanderings.

But if you're intentional about them, you can also get immersed in collections of knowledge that are more useful than you'll be able to quantify.