The great Twitter meltdown and migration to Mastodon have started me thinking about identity on the internet.

Every time you start an account in a new location on the internet, you can decide how much of yourself you want to share. Or, more correctly, what parts of yourself you want to share. Most people lurk, which means they show nothing. If you just like things, it can feel like you’re encouraging people who think what you think without committing to actually taking a position.

Here are the levels of social interaction on social media. Obviously not all-inclusive, and there is some variation in different networks.

1. Being somewhere. Choosing to exist in a space
2. Making an account.
3. Choosing a username
4. Choosing an avatar
5. Filling out a bio
6. Liking or favoriting a post
7. Commenting on a post
8. Sharing the post on your timeline
9. Posting yourself
10. Actively trying to be part of a larger community

Choosing to interact with something after you’ve investigated it is an intentional expression of identity. Reddit is an excellent example of a social network that people look at but choose not to participate in. Google even adds the word “Reddit” in suggested searches because they know that people are not in the eco-system of Reddit and they want to point people toward useful information. They want the information without being part of Reddit.

Most people haunt a location before deciding to add their affiliation to it to their identity. And that’s just in private. The next step is to actually create an account. Even after this happens, some users can try and backtrack. “I only created this account to follow the posts from my local police department.” This allows them to feel superior to the social network and reject it from their identity even if they end up following a hundred accounts. 

In creating an account, the first step is choosing your username. To remove the “identity” part of this process, a lot of social media sites will suggest a username, so you don’t have to think about or think it defines you. This is why you see so many usernames that are just a first names with a string of numbers after them. The user is not taking ownership of their own name, they can shrug and say, “That isn’t me; it was just chosen for me.”

Now that you have a name, what do you want to look like here? Do you want your actual face to represent you? Your dog? An aspirational picture of what you want to be? You can leave it blank if you don’t want to limit yourself. 

Right next to that is a bio. Do you fill it out? Which parts of yourself do you want to highlight? Do you want to lie? Tell the truth? Brag? Be humble? 

Why join a social network if you’re not going to pick a picture to represent you and write a short bio to find other people like yourself? 

I think it’s about feeling inferior or superior to the location. Fear of being judged or having the ability to judge because you aren’t REALLY there. 

Part 2 coming soon