Meta versus Mesa

Ok fine I'll be legible for 2 minutes

Recently I made a chart placing various Bluesky users on Cozy vs Perturbed and Mesa vs Meta. Many people were confused by this so I decided to write up the explanation after being told it was an interesting set of ideas.

COZY vs PERTURBED

Cozy & Perturbed are fair intuitive I think, most TPOT posters tend to like a certain mix of the two “as a bit”. Cozy is the kind of affable/cooperative/playful interaction style of reply guys in the subgraph. I associate it with affection towards other and things in the world that some OPs have even outside their replies. Generally: someone who seems regulated on the timeline*. Perturbed is naturally the opposite here, someone more aggravated or less affable and more antagonistic. This isn’t all encompassing though - people I rated as perturbed may have only been internally perturbed and it showed through in their posting styles. Perturbed was me vibe checking you through the text, peering through the screen to see how you were doing*. I’ll go into how posting as a stereotypical raging troll is different from this in a bit.

* This doesn’t mean people are not different in their daily lives, I necessarily only assessing their vibe in the context of their Twitter-Self. People could and do look up from their phones and enter a completely different mode of self.

MESA vs META

OBJECT

To really explain Mesa I have to start you with the middle of the chart, the unlabeled OBJECT level. Tweets about the world like “I had ice cream today and it was good” or “I dislike Gen Z’s chaotic mashup music styles” are neither Meta or Mesa. Most posts fall very close to the center of this graph in my mind, with a bias towards being perturbed. TPOT on the other hand, is very meta - reddit /r/circlejerk has nothing on this crowd.

Twitter default, probably

META

Meta is self referential; talking about talking about the people who talk about talking about the thing that other people talk about when they’re doing a thing because they heard some other people talking about talking about doing another thing. A lot of these layers are buried in the shared context - which is good because TPOT references and ingroup jokes are rapid and meta-iterated by default. Even things that could just be parallel uses of a framing are usually done using meta, because that’s the culture.

As an aside, we live in a period of constant change/acceleration. Regardless of what your AI timelines actually are, the internet existing means that culture is going to move faster than any other period in history: meta-by-default was inevitable.

MESA

OK finally - Mesa. Mesa is “below” the object level, a tweet that is informationally only a fragment of a normal object level tweet. I think of these tweets as being very similar to emoji reacts, there isn’t 0 information there and it can be a useful reply but it’s not a full tweet on it’s own - it’s only meaningful in the context of something else. I think there is a certain amount of awareness that goes into mesa-posting beyond bot-like behavior and it’s even a good style of posting in some cases. Bot posts can fall in this category but I would need another axis for context-awareness to show the difference between a skilled human and a bot mesa-posting. This is why I would differentiate B3rduck from Mimi - B3rduck isn’t aware of the same degree of context that Mimi is. One example of this that is a little more Object is body language.

Body language is extremely contextual, and when you’re highly synced with someone you can convey a lot of information with an extremely generic “language” of possible movements. In the same way, skillful mesa-posting is context aware to the point of removing the actual self support context of the post off of the belief that the reader/intended audience will understand. This brings us to a bit of a horseshoe theory type of situation, since many meta-posters will also do this at the same time. I still maintain that TPOT is more meta but I could easily split Mesa onto a different axis away from Meta and add more nuance.

OK now what

I think being aware (meta) of how you’re posting can make you a better poster. After all, what’s even your goal on Twitter/Bluesky/etc? Being mindful about your posting is an obvious thing to do when you’re throwing up a multi-dimensional QR code to attract your people. GL!