Fishbourne Roman Palace announced they were leaving Bluesky, heavily implying it was because someone had pulled the plug on them. Hundreds of outraged comments (and emails) later, they were back up trying to pass it off as a joke. Which I don’t buy.

I can imagine a social media-illiterate person in a regional archaeology service seeing their posts and assuming it was wasting time, when in fact it was raising the Palace’s profile among a way wider group of people and professionals. The Palace was definitely on the very periphery of my brain before I followed their account.

But I think it’s a case of something which is getting rarer these days: a person with deep knowledge and passion about an institution having a crack at social media without asking for permission. I can understand a senior manager wanting to put a bit of thinking and strategy behind something like that rather than letting someone ‘go rogue’, but this isn’t the way to go about it.

Content of this week

• This is a novel way of advertising your events.

• Slay in the archives.

• This is a beautiful story about an object. It’s also quite by the numbers - a simple hooky title and a mostly single-shot presenter speaking. It lives or dies by how good the story is, the charisma of the artist and the object itself. If you have objects and people that tick those boxes, just put them on camera.

• Some great prop BTS here from the Sydney Theatre Company.

• Simon Clabby (ex Mary Rose, now Royal Navy Museum) has been periodically sharing content he never got around to posting. And I’m here to say he should definitely have posted it.

The bullet point bit

• Ash Mann had a lot of good stuff in his newsletter this week, including this article on how social media has become parasocial media. Basically summarising the data that’s always coming out showing people scroll and they consume, but they rarely interact with each other and build communities as much as they used to.

• Meta is testing a subscription model for Instagram, where you can…have your Stories last longer and choose who sees them, plus a few other cosmetic things. It’s separate to Verification so is aimed more at normal people, but it’s a slippery slope for gated features.

• The EU Commission have found Meta guilty of failing to keep children off its platforms, so expect some age verification at some point.

• Meta have also published some research indicating your age isn’t a good indicator of how you use social media, your life stage is. Which feels more natural than just lumping everyone into an age bracket. It also includes some other really interesting findings, including five principles for 2026:

  • Lifestage > Age. The biggest behavioral gaps are created by life moments, not birth years. Go broad and let creative self-select.

  • Variety > Monotony. Same message, multiple executions. People welcome variation, and the algorithm rewards it too.

  • Expertise > Popularity. The creator economy is shifting from fame to knowledge. Partner for fit, not following.

  • Social > Search. For discovery, the scroll is the new starting point. Fund inspiration where it's being created.

  • DMs > Broadcast. The value vs. usage messaging gap is a blue ocean. Unlock commerce with an AI sales concierge (🤮).

Personal stuff I do for me and you can just skip this if you like

🎮📖 what I’m consuming as a consumer

I’m finishing the last book of Alex Phelby’s Mordew trilogy, which among a lot of other things features God’s corpse beneath Paris, spawning horrors from his dreams in the living mud above.

I’ve also been dipping into a lot of Peep Show again, featuring the truest mantra ever said.

🐕 Keith

Here he is (he voted Reform)