In order to let people know about new articles on martinfowler.com, I
post announcements on social media. I’ve been doing this for a long time,
starting on Twitter back in 2008. After the muskover, social media
became rather more fragmented, and I now post announcements on four social
media platforms: LinkedIn, X, Fediverse (Mastodon), and Bluesky. It’s a bit
tedious, but it doesn’t take too long to copy/paste the announcements on
each site, with a bit of tweaking as necessary. (I also post announcements
to my RSS feed. If I were following me, I’d use
RSS.)
From time to time, I look at the traffic on these sites. (Last time was
in 2025) The main thing
I’m interested in is how much engagement I get from each service, so I can
get a sense of their importance for my announcements. There are three data
items that I can use to sense this: retweets, likes, and replies. Here’s
some plots of that data for my posts over the last couple of months (19
total)
Figure 1: number of retweets for posts from June 16 to Sep 6 2026
Figure 2: number of replies for the same period
Figure 3: number of likes for the same period
I don’t like using simple averages to compare things, they are often
misleading and blur useful information. So these plots combine a
strip chart (showing each post as a point, with some horizontal jitter) and
a box plot (to show median and quartiles). This way we can see the whole
distribution while also being able to compare useful summaries within them.
Looking at this, there’s a clear ranking between the services. LinkedIn
is clear leader at engagement numbers. I tend to take the retweets most
seriously, since they suggest a desire to recommend a post for others to
consider. I’ll chop off the upper outliers there to zoom in on the core
data.
Figure 4: Retweets, zooming in on the core data
LinkedIn clearly has an edge there, with X a clear second, its upper
quartile is below LinkedIn’s median. Bluesky and Mastodon are tiny in
comparison, their upper quartiles are below X’s lower quartile, although
Mastdon’s is visibly above that of Bluesky.
Looking at this data, there’s a strong argument for stopping
announcements on Bluesky and Mastodon, as they get such little response. I
will continue with them, however, since they are open platforms – and I have
a clear preference for open platforms over the walled gardens of LinkedIn
and X.
Another way of judging this is to look at source traffic for the website,
after all the whole point of announcing posts is to bring readers. Here’s
some data on that, taken from my website analytics:
Figure 5: sources of traffic in 90 days prior to Sep 7
2026
This reflects the data above, LinkedIn is clearly a bigger source of
traffic than X, which is far above bluesky (we can’t really assess Mastodon
here, but I expect it would also be a very thin line). But even LinkedIn is
a minor source of traffic compared to google. And google’s 300,000 or so is
a small part of the 1.7M visits the site got in those 90 days.
I last did this analysis in early 2025.
Comparing the box plots for the retweets indicates how things have
changed.
Figure 6: Compared retweets from posts in mid 2026 to
early 2025.
LinkedIn has grown a little bit, X has dropped notably, and Bluesky has
dropped dramatically.
Using social media
The main point of this post was to share what I’m seeing for social
media traffic. But this is also a decent time for me to mention how I use
social media in 2026 AD.
When it comes to writing to social media, almost everything I do is
these announcements of posts on my site. When Twitter was dominant, I’d
also share small thoughts, and posts to interesting things I’d run into. I
now do that in my fragments posts, many of which
are dots on the above graphs. I prefer using the
fragments, which is essentially rediscovering the olde link blog,
since I have more freedom in what I write there, don’t have to copy to
multiple sites, and it shows up in my (preferred) RSS feed.
I do a bit more when it comes to reading this social media. I do read
any replies to announcement posts, as I’m naturally curious to see what
people say about them. I also use social media more generally, in much the
same way as I did in the Twitter days. That is, I have a fixed list of
people I follow, and I read their posts in reverse-chronological order. I
actively avoid any kind of “algorithmic” feed. That makes LinkedIn pretty hopeless for me, as there’s
no way to do that over there, the engagementmaxxing feed is forced onto my
home page. So I ignore it, which is a pity considering
how much more engagement it generates than its rivals these days.
X also pushes its “For You” feed of slop, but I can circumvent it, as
I’ve always done, by building lists. I put people I’m interested in on
those lists, and read those. Mastodon and
Bluesky make it easier to do this, which is one of their advantages. If
someone posts on multiple social networks, I prefer to follow them on
Bluesky, due to being an open platform and its user-interface. I also
continue to use RSS feeds when I can, and I’m glad that services like
Substack support them.
Given all that, I haven’t really noticed the problems that people
complain about for X and Bluesky. Occasionally I get some pests showing up
in my replies, but that’s rare. Twitter was a mess in its day too, and
sticking to my lists insulated me from all that. I really wish LinkedIn
gave me that ability, maybe there’s some posts on there that aren’t slop
(and often AI-generated slop). But as it stands, it’s sad that
the biggest site for me in terms of engagement is also the one I can’t
stand.
(I might also mention that the one social media site I do enjoy,
and contribute to, is BoardGameGeek. It’s
interesting to see how well it’s held up over the years. Being focused on
a niche hobby surely helps.)
