The Secret Cabal Gaming Podcast (@thesecretcabal.bsky.social)

Can You Grow Without Social Media? Board Game Beat Is About to Find Out We've been getting a lot of comments about our decision to use federated social media instead of Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — both positive and negative.In this video, I explain what the fediverse is, talk about why we're going fediverse-first with our social media, respond to some of the objections we've been hearing, and offer different ways to keep up with Board Game Beat.<figure class="kg-card kg-embed-card"><iframe width="560" height="315" title="Can You Grow Without Social Media? Board Game Beat Is About to Find Out" src="https://video.ploud.fr/videos/embed/c6c4aa15-1684-4047-8333-bf39f3077087" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></figure>The full transcript is under the video, along with a source list.<h3 id="read-the-transcript">Read the Transcript</h3>Welcome to Board Game Beat. I'm your host, W. Eric Martin. Thanks for watching this channel and for signing up for memberships on the site. Thanks as well to all the sponsors who have signed up for advertisements before the site is even launched. That's a real vote of confidence.When I announced Board Game Beat, I said that the site would be fediverse-first. That is, it will use federated social media. To which some people said, "Why?" and others, "What??"So in this video, I thought I would describe the fediverse, talk about my reasons for avoiding social media, respond to objections to going fediverse first, and explain how you can follow Board Game Beat in various ways.Federated social media sites are social media, of course, but when I talk about social media in this video, I'm referring to places like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter and Tiktok.What's the difference between the two? Social media is typically a bubble. All of your information, images and contacts are within that one space, and you don't have crossover connectivity between different social media sites. Federated social media is a network of independent sites that connect. You can have an account on Mastodon, for example, which is akin to Twitter, and read posts on Lemmy, which is analogous to Facebook, and you can respond to those posts on Lemmy from Mastodon.Federated social media is akin to email, in that you can send that email to and receive email from anyone with an email account, no matter what platform they use.Unlike traditional social media, most federated social media sites are not ad driven or organized around engagement. So when you visit those platforms, you will see what you want to see. For a tutorial on the fediverse, you can go to jointhefediverse.net. To see where you can find Board Game Beat on the fediverse, Go to wericmartin.com/follow. What's so bad about social media sites anyway...Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and all that? You probably have reasons of your own, and let me give 10 here first.One: As I said, social media sites own everything that you post. They can remove your followers, your posts, your images, they can demonetize you, and you may not be aware of what they're actually doing. There were a number of YouTubers who were demonetized mistakenly, and did not realize it for quite a while. So they thought they were earning money on this platform where they were publishing things and they weren't.Two, social media invades your privacy, monitoring everything that you click, read, watch or share so that it can create a profile of you to sell to advertisers. Regulators have penalized social media sites with huge fines over the years for all sorts of violations along these lines.Three, social media has sneaky ways to keep you engaged and to steer your consent with you not always being in control of what you see.Four, social media is designed to keep you on it as long as possible, thanks to tools like the infinite scroll and algorithmic feeds that will keep delivering material to you, as long as you're willing to look.Five, social media can take advantage of its users in surprising ways. In her book Careless People, Sarah Wynn Williams, former Director of Public Policy at Facebook, told a story in which in 2017 Facebook informed advertisers that it could target teens who feel insecure and worthless. They're looking for individuals who had posted selfies and then deleted them immediately. Clearly, these kids weren't feeling their best, so maybe you should target them with ads for makeup.Six, social media discriminates against its users. In 2022 the US Justice Department filed a claim against Meta, stating that it used its users private information relating to their race, religious status, sexual identity, disability and other private information in order to help advertisers target certain people with housing ads...and avoid targeting others. In a settlement with the Justice Department, Meta promised to change this system.Seven, social media wants as many eyes on it as possible, and it will drive engagement by amplifying posts that deal with rage baiting, commentary on politicians and public figures, and other commentary that drives their users' anger and fear. In a study that looked at Twitter's engagement-ranked timeline, it found a much greater percentage of angry posts compared to a reverse chronological timeline.Eight, social media allows the proliferation of misinformation. A study that looked at trending videos on Tiktok under the hashtag #mentalhealthtips found that half of them had misinformation about anxiety, depression, and other mental health topics.Nine, social media is filled with people who aren't actually people. One study looked at large conversations on Twitter that dealt with major global events, and estimated that 20% of the comments came from bots. Another study looked at the videos that new users on YouTube saw, and found that 1/5 of them were low quality AI efforts.Ten, social media gets worse over time. In 2022 Cory Doctorow coined the term "enshittification" to talk about the way in which businesses — not just social media but all online businesses — tend to get worse over time, because initially they offer very promising things to users, drawing lots of people to the site, making connections among people, making it a place where they feel they need to go. Once they're all there, you start attracting advertisers who are now going to target these users and degrade the service that the users were there initially enjoying. Then, over time, once the advertisers are there as well, it will make the service worse for those advertisers as well, because they still feel like they need to use it there's not anywhere else to go to reach these people who also have nowhere else to go.That's enough for now. And while some of these objections can apply to federated social media, it's not quite the same, because most federated social media sites are not ad driven and not trying to drive engagement constantly, because they are not profit driven in the same way as traditional social media sites.Let's talk about objections to Board Game Beat being fediverse First, with the primary one being "Eric, if you want to talk to as many people as possible, shouldn't you go where the most people are located?" And to some degree, this objection might seem valid in that FediDB.com's 2025 year in review showed that there were 12 million user accounts on federated social media sites, compared to 10 billion accounts on traditional social media sites.And that is indeed quite a difference in volume, but there's a large percentage of bot accounts on traditional social media. There's lots of accounts that have been abandoned and no longer used, such as my Facebook and Twitter accounts, because I don't post on those sites anymore. They still exist, but I'm not active there. They don't count. So the mere existence of the site doesn't indicate that there is a person waiting to see what you have posted. Not to get into the issues as well of the algorithm not affecting what people actually see compared to what they want to see compared to the people they follow.Federated social media is growing. There were 450,000 new user accounts in 2025. Bluesky, which is federated adjacent because it doesn't have quite the same architecture, grew by 10 million users in 2025...and it is a much more welcoming site than some trash fires that exist. So why not go there instead? You want to interact with people who are actually engaged with a conversation. So let's go there.I expect federated social media will continue to grow in the future, and I want to be part of that. The argument that that's where all the people were, so that's where you should be too...that could be valid, but it also could be, "Why would we all want to be in this terrible situation just because other people are there...why not go and find a new situation, different environment that we find more pleasant?"Other people can still share Board Game Beat items on traditional social media sites. I don't stop that in any way. I'm just not participating in that myself.Another complaint is that I have a responsibility to grow the company and stay in business. I need to make the beat stronger and louder so that people can hear it, and I definitely want to keep my business running. I want to support my family and be able to support all of us here that I need to support. If I grow over time, I can bring in employees and cover aspects of the game industry that I don't cover myself due to lack of time or background.I would love to do all that, but I'm not concerned about exponential growth. I don't have funders who are demanding that I get more people signing up for the site. I want to write in a way that I can sustain at a slow and steady growth rate, and I'm happy to operate along those lines where I can somewhat automate publication on Mastodon and Lemmy through subscription services, and I can spend time focusing on writing that will ideally attract people to the site, rather than promoting the site. There's no value that I see on just that promotion. I'd rather be able to write material that then other people can find value in and possibly they share on their own. I don't have to worry about growing forever.Finally, just as I don't need to post on traditional social media to share everything I've written, you don't have to join federated social media in order to see it. You can go to wericmartin.com to see everything posted on Board Game Beat. If you don't want to visit the site regularly, I'll be sad, but that might be your choice. You can sign up for a membership, whether free or a paid one, that will help cover the cost of travel to conventions in the future for more game coverage.You can choose to get posts via email, either on an individual basis, as they are posted, or in a weekly digest. You can also take advantage of RSS feeds so you can get things without going on federated social media. I want to do what I'm doing without going on traditional social media. I'm happy to have slow, steady growth with people ideally enjoying what I'm doing, being glad to support it, sharing it in whatever way they feel is appropriate. And ideally, we can all find great things that we love to play. We can talk about games in all sorts of different ways. I'm very excited to do that, and I want to spend as much time as possible thinking and interviewing and reading, researching, playing and writing.And traditional social media has been just self promotion. Instead, I wanted to focus on creative activities, both what I'm doing and what game designers and creators are doing, in order to spend as much time as possible writing and thinking about that. And ideally, we'll have fun discovering new things and enjoying a playful world. Thanks very much for your support, and hope to see you either online or in the real world. At the game table, maybe...who knows what could happen?<h3 id="sources">Sources</h3>Mastodon: Decentralized social media (Mastodon) <a href="https://joinmastodon.org/" rel="noreferrer">https://joinmastodon.org</a>Using the network features (Mastodon documentation) <a href="https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network/" rel="noreferrer">https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/network</a>Moving to a different server (Mastodon documentation) <a href="https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/" rel="noreferrer">https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving</a>Join the Fediverse: a beginner-friendly tutorial (JoinTheFediverse.net) <a href="https://jointhefediverse.net/" rel="noreferrer">https://jointhefediverse.net</a>Careless People (Sarah Wynn-Williams, 2025) <a href="https://shop.booksandbooks.com/book/9781250391230">https://shop.booksandbooks.com/book/9781250391230</a>Board Game Beat fediverse profile links <a href="https://www.wericmartin.com/follow">https://www.wericmartin.com/follow</a>YouTube’s AI flags content without reasons, sparking outrage over terminations without warning (MSN) <a href="https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/youtube-s-ai-flags-content-without-reasons-sparking-outrage-over-terminations-without-warning/ar-AA1SaBqh">https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/youtube-s-ai-flags-content-without-reasons-sparking-outrage-over-terminations-without-warning/ar-AA1SaBqh</a>Facebook Agrees to Pay $5 Billion and Implement Robust New Protections for User Information (U.S. Department of Justice, July 24, 2019) <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/facebook-agrees-pay-5-billion-and-implement-robust-new-protections-user-information" rel="noreferrer">https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/facebook-agrees-pay-5-billion-and-implement-robust-new-protections-user-information</a>Bringing Dark Patterns to Light (FTC staff report, September 14, 2022) (PDF) <a href="https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P214800%20Dark%20Patterns%20Report%209.14.2022%20-%20FINAL.pdf" rel="noreferrer">https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/ftc_gov/pdf/P214800%20Dark%20Patterns%20Report%209.14.2022%20-%20FINAL.pdf</a>Dutch court orders Meta to change Facebook and Instagram timeline settings (Reuters, October 2, 2025) <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/dutch-court-orders-meta-change-facebook-instagram-timeline-settings-2025-10-02/" rel="noreferrer">https://www.reuters.com/technology/dutch-court-orders-meta-change-facebook-instagram-timeline-settings-2025-10-02/</a>Dutch court gives Meta more time to change timeline settings (Reuters, October 28, 2025) <a href="https://www.reuters.com/technology/dutch-court-gives-meta-more-time-change-timeline-settings-2025-10-28/" rel="noreferrer">https://www.reuters.com/technology/dutch-court-gives-meta-more-time-change-timeline-settings-2025-10-28/</a>Facebook told advertisers it can identify teens feeling “insecure” and “worthless” (The Guardian, May 1, 2017) <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-advertising-data-insecure-teens" rel="noreferrer">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/01/facebook-advertising-data-insecure-teens</a>Justice Department Secures Groundbreaking Settlement Agreement with Meta Platforms [....] to Resolve Allegations of Discriminatory Advertising (U.S. Department of Justice, June 21, 2022) <a href="https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-groundbreaking-settlement-agreement-meta-platforms-formerly-known" rel="noreferrer">https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/justice-department-secures-groundbreaking-settlement-agreement-meta-platforms-formerly-known</a>Engagement, User Satisfaction, and the Amplification of Divisive Content on Social Media (Knight First Amendment Institute, January 3, 2024) <a href="https://knightcolumbia.org/content/engagement-user-satisfaction-and-the-amplification-of-divisive-content-on-social-media" rel="noreferrer">https://knightcolumbia.org/content/engagement-user-satisfaction-and-the-amplification-of-divisive-content-on-social-media</a>More internal documents show how Facebook’s algorithm prioritized anger and posts that triggered it (Nieman Lab, October 26, 2021) <a href="https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/more-internal-documents-show-how-facebooks-algorithm-prioritized-anger-and-posts-that-triggered-it/" rel="noreferrer">https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/10/more-internal-documents-show-how-facebooks-algorithm-prioritized-anger-and-posts-that-triggered-it/</a>More than half of top 100 mental health TikToks contain misinformation, study finds (The Guardian, May 31, 2025) <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/31/more-than-half-of-top-100-mental-health-tiktoks-contain-misinformation-study-finds" rel="noreferrer">https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/may/31/more-than-half-of-top-100-mental-health-tiktoks-contain-misinformation-study-finds</a>A global comparison of social media bot and human characteristics (Scientific Reports/Nature, March 31, 2025) <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96372-1" rel="noreferrer">https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-96372-1</a>More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are ‘AI slop’, study finds (The Guardian, December 27, 2025) <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds" rel="noreferrer">https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/dec/27/more-than-20-of-videos-shown-to-new-youtube-users-are-ai-slop-study-finds</a>How monopoly enshittified Amazon (Pluralistic, November 28, 2022) <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/">https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/</a>Tiktok's enshittification (Pluralistic, January 21, 2023) <a href="https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys" rel="noopener">https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys</a>The ‘Enshittification’ of TikTok (WIRED, January 23, 2023) <a href="https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/" rel="noreferrer">https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/</a>Fediverse network statistics (FediDB) <a href="https://fedidb.com/">https://fedidb.com/</a>Fediverse stats page (Fediverse.Party) <a href="https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/" rel="noreferrer">https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/</a>Bluesky now has 30 million users (The Verge, January 29, 2025) <a href="https://www.theverge.com/news/602049/bluesky-now-has-30-million-users" rel="noreferrer">https://www.theverge.com/news/602049/bluesky-now-has-30-million-users</a>Bluesky hits 40 million users, introduces ‘dislikes’ beta (TechCrunch, October 31, 2025) <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/bluesky-hits-40-million-users-introduces-dislikes-beta">https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/31/bluesky-hits-40-million-users-introduces-dislikes-beta</a> <div style="text-align:center;color:#E26D5A;letter-spacing:6px;font-size:14px;line-height:14px;margin:20px 0"> • • • • • • • • • • • • • • </div> <aside class="mt-10 pt-2 text-center text-base"> Like what you read? Leave a tip to support independent board game journalism! <a href="#/portal/support" class="px-4 py-2 bg-brand text-brand-contrast rounded-btn hover:brightness-110 no-underline" style="text-decoration:none"> Leave a tip </a> </aside> https://www.wericmartin.com/federated-social-media-video/