Anti-Social Media

23 Apr 2023 | ~4 minute read

I've felt a bit...meh about social media recently so wanted to jot down some thoughts about it all.

I've recently written about Micro.blog, having my own self-hosted microblog, and having a backup on the Fediverse. If it's not clear by all my pissing about in that space, I'm not too happy with how things are in my social media circles at the moment.

Basically, I've been trying a lot of new stuff because I'm not getting a great deal of satisfaction from social media at the moment.

When I say "social media" I pretty much mean the Fediverse, as that's the only social media I use.

All I hear on the Fedi are people incessantly whinging about "Bird Site" (fuck, I hate that term), the blue checkmarks, "Melon Husk" (seriously, why can't people on the Fedi just use real names?) and all manor of related things.

Like, seriously, if the Fedi is so much better than Twitter, shut the fuck up about Twitter! Yes, Musk is a dick. Yes, it's a shit show over there. Can we all move on now?

Filters!

Use filters, Kev!

-- All the people

I do! But filters aren't perfect and stuff still gets through. Especially with the silly naming conventions on the Fedi, it's hard to keep up. Plus, in my opinion, if you need to filter out a lot of words from your social feeds, you're probably running in the wrong social circles.

A new approach...?

Maybe I need to nuke and pave my followers and start again? Maybe I need a hiatus from social media for a while? Or, maybe I need to completely change the way I approach social media?

If you look at people like Nicolas Magand and Manu Moreale, they have zero social presence online, instead opting for their blog as their single place on the web.

Honestly, I'm thinking about doing something similar. I find myself doom-scrolling through my Mastodon feeds, getting more and more frustrated at the unrelated (to me) droves of content.

But I do regularly have great interactions on Mastodon. It really isn't all bad, far from it. I don't think I could follow in the footsteps of Nicolas and Manu, as I do enjoy my time on the Fedi...sometimes. But something has to change.

Micro.blog

After writing my thoughts on Micro.blog recently, I decided to sign up and take it for a proper spin. Problem is, I now have 2 social networks to maintain, which is compounding the issue, I think.

But I'm really enjoying my time on Micro.blog. I can login, spend five minutes catching up on what's going on, then move on with my day. There's no doom-scrolling, and because I've recently started fresh with the people I'm following, I'm enjoying the content I'm seeing there - it feels so much more diverse than on my Mastodon feeds.

Also, because Micro.blog is tied very closely to personal blogging, I'm finding lot of new blogs to follow. Win/win.

What to do?

I don't know what to do, dear reader. I think I've narrowed it down to a couple of options:

1. Double-down on Micro.blog and port all my Mastodon followers over to there.
2. Nuke and pave the people I follow on Mastodon, then re-build.

Number 1 would mean me moving off of Fosstodon, which is awkward, as I'm one of the admins. If I did go down that route, it would be something Mike and I would have to discuss in detail and come up with a plan for me to step down.

Thinking about it - I'm not much of a user of FOSS anymore. I don't use Linux, and so a lot of the discussions around those topics don't interest me any more.

I do still advocate for open source software and privacy, but being the admin of an instance dedicated to FOSS, when I don't actually use that much FOSS, is a little hypocritical, I think.

This is NOT me stepping down from Fosstodon. This is me **THINKING** about stepping down. If I do, Fosstodon will be unaffected, don't worry.

What would you do?

I read a lot of people having similar challenges with social media. So I know there's people out there, reading this, that can relate.

To those people, I'd love to hear your opinions on all this. If you do want to opine, please make use of the reply button below - I'd love to have a chat with you.

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