I’ve just been to two traditional Czech open source conferences – LinuxDays and OpenAlt – and I’ve noticed one interesting shift: the communication on social media during the conferences has disappeared.

After 2010, we suddenly all had a device in our pocket that we could easily use to share experiences and observations from anywhere. And at least at IT events, people started doing this a lot. Under the hashtag of the given conference, there was a stream of messages from participants about which talks they liked, where they could find a good place to eat in the area, what caught their attention among the booths. The event organizers used this to inform visitors, and the booth staff to attract people to their booth. I remember writing about what we had interesting at our booth, and people actually came to have a look based on that.

At the peak of this trend, the popular so-called Twitter walls were in use. These were typically web applications that displayed the latest messages under a given hashtag, and they ran on screens in the corridors or were projected directly in the lecture rooms, so that even those who weren’t following it on their mobile phones could keep track.

And today, all of this has practically disappeared. When I counted it after LinuxDays, there were a total of 14 messages with the #linuxdays hashtag on Mastodon during the conference, and only 8 on Twitter. During OpenAlt, there were 20 messages with the #openalt hashtag on Mastodon and 8 on Twitter. I also checked if it was running on Bluesky. There were a few messages with the hashtags of both conferences there, but except for one, they were all bridged from Mastodon.

In any case, these are absolutely negligible numbers compared to what we used to see ten years ago. Where did it all go? I thought about it and came up with four reasons:

1. Microblogging is much more fragmented today than it was ten years ago. Back then, we were all on Twitter. That is now in decline. The open-source community has largely moved to Mastodon, but not entirely. Some are still on LinkedIn, some on Bluesky, etc. When there is no single place where everyone is, the effect of a universal communication channel disappears.
2. Conference communication has partly shifted to instant messaging. This trend started 8-9 years ago. A group (typically on Telegram) was created for conference attendees, and it served for conference communication. Compared to a microblogging platform, this has the advantage that it is not entirely open communication. What happens at the conference, stays at the conference. It doesn’t take the form of publicly searchable messages. For some, this is a safer space than a social network. It’s also faster, with features like location sharing, etc. However, this mode of communication has also declined a lot. During OpenAlt, there were only 20 messages in its Telegram group.
3. People are much more passive on social media today. Rather than sharing their own posts from the conference, they’d rather leave it to some influencer who will make a cool video from there, which everyone will then watch and like. All the major social networks have shifted towards a small group creating content for a passive majority. New platforms like TikTok have been functioning this way from the start.
4. After Covid, people simply don’t have the same need to share their conference experiences online. They are somewhat saturated with it after the Covid years, and when they go somewhere, they don’t want to tap messages into their phone about how they’re doing there.

Overall, I don’t see it as a bad thing. Yes, it had its charm, and it was easier during the conference to draw attention to your booth or talk, but in today’s digital age, any shift towards offline is welcome. After all, conferences are there for people to meet in person. Otherwise, we could just watch the streams from home and write about them on social media. We’ve been there before, and it wasn’t quite right. 🙂

How do you see it? Do you also notice that you share less online from conferences?