LGM as Social Media 2026
By 
Updating some thoughts I had last year on the blogosphere as forerunner of social media, and possible answer to the collapse of social media…
Disqus statistics can be legitimately hard to parse, but from what I can tell our comment section has seen an increase in traffic over the past 18 months, which tells me we’re playing an important role in the ongoing fallout of the participation collapses at X and Facebook. Blogging emerged and became prominent before social media, and while the two forms have certain similar functions I don’t think it’s correct to say that the latter evolved from the former. That said, they certainly serve some of the same purposes. When Elon began to enshittify X my own first option was the LGM comment section. One of the chief upsides of being a front pager is that you can throw out a post that’s not, in itself, much longer or more detailed than a tweet, and yet dozens to hundreds of people will comment about whatever you want them to talk about for the next several hours. My status as a heavy user of this comment section ended around 2008, but it was nevertheless a first option to pursue when X became useless. Since then I’ve become a heavy user of Bluesky, a light user of X, and an ever lighter user of Facebook and Threads.
I still find the culture of Bluesky frustrating. Bluesky remains dominated by Resistance Libs, a group that largely conforms with my own ideological preferences. Unfortunately, if you say something like “I am 97% in compliance with the ideological norms of this community,” someone will start hunting for the 3% of heresy so that they can screech at you as loudly as possible. Social networks are places to fight, so Bluesky has become a place where people have big fights over small differences. “Why do MSM journalists and Democratic Congressional staffers prefer the Nazis to us?” is still a question that people on Bluesky ask. It’s reasonable to conclude that there’s something wrong with THEM, but it should also be cause for concern that there might be something wrong with YOU; I’ve seen New York Times journalists metaphorically eaten alive and called to account for articles that were literally published before they joined the paper and (sometimes) even before they were born.
I also remain bothered by the fact that some sections of Bluesky are incredibly hostile to anyone who remains on X, which is absolutely a necessity for people who are part of cross-ideological communities or communities which have almost any kind of international component at all. I know who InfantryDort is not because I see him on X, but because so many folks screencap his posts so they can dunk on Bluesky. There are people with valuable technical knowledge about the war in Iran or the war in Ukraine or airpower or naval power who do not share Bluesky’s ideological priors and will never, ever join that community. Mention this on Bluesky and you’ll get a flood of retorts about how every account on X is a right wing propagandist and how even looking at a feed will turn you into a Nazi.
That said, there’s not much point in posting anything to X anymore unless you have a VERY large following or a blue check. Nothing I post gets any traction at all, and most of the posting I do constitutes either muscle-memory (clicking on RT out of reflex), support for organizations that I’m part of (University Press of Kentucky, for example), or angry rants at people who aren’t on Bluesky. I do not begrudge anyone the decision to stay and I don’t really begrudge the decision to subscribe, although it’s worth noting that not all of the LGM contributors share this view. In the cold logic of ends-means rationality, I can totally understand why so many accounts that were prominent before the Change have decided to bend the knee and buy the blue check. And indeed if we were coldly rational here we’d probably use your hard-earned $$$ to subscribe all of the front pagers and the institutional account… but of course it’s not all about hard, cold rationality, as y’all would probably get extremely upset if we did that.
But I digress. The takeaway remains that the LGM comment section is a refuge from the destruction or collapse of other social media networks. Which y’all probably know because you are, after all, here. It is not free of the problems that social networking sites have, including good faith disputes that escalate out of proportion and bad faith trolls. Blocking is important on every platform and it’s important here and I know that people feel we’re arbitrary but as this is one of the longest running comment sections in the history of the blogosphere it can’t be all bad. Anyway, here’s the Page that links to all of our social media accounts, if you’re the sort of person who’s still looking for accounts to follow.