Just enough social media
I’ve had this paragraph on the home page of my personal website for a while now:
Disconnected from social media, but will always answer an email.
My retreat from social media was gradual and uneventful. I left Facebook so long ago that I barely remember what I used it for. I left Instagram well before it became the weird jumble of videos, shorts and occasionally photos it is today. People trying to be brands, brands posing as people. Twitter broke my heart - it connected me to many cool people, helped me find an audience as a musician, and led to lifelong friendships. And then it all went to shit - though honestly, it had been going to shit for a while.
It was a clean break. For the most part, I haven’t missed social media. I’ve kept in touch with friends in other ways, from the ubiquitous WhatsApp to the venerable email. “Missing out” is a blessing, not a curse. In my opinion, humans can’t handle the sheer volume of raw data provided by social media: news, non-news, reactions to news, counter-reactions, faster than anyone can read or process. All tied to the ever-present numbers through each one can obsessively measure one’s worth in this worldwide race to the bottom. Or maybe it’s just me. Whatever the case, I wasn’t built for it and have worked to make things as quiet as possible..
And yet. And yet - what else but those two words? - there’s a gap in my life where social media slots right in. I can’t tell whether that gap has always been there or if it was carved out of some part of me that previously held more significance, but that’s besides the point. It exists and is undeniable.
RSS is great. RSS is life. A direct line to the thoughts of the people whose ideas you respect, admire or feel are worth your time. Blogging is just as rewarding. The lack of immediate feedback (or any feedback at all) is a feature, not a bug. It allows you to let go of the notion of performance that is so endemic to social media. You write because you must, or because you feel like it, because sometimes writing is necessary.
Between consumption and creation, there's a void I've struggled with. Sometimes, my thoughts didn't feel "big" enough for a blog post. Other times, replying to someone else's blog post by email felt like too much.
Glass was my gateway back to social media. There’s so much about it that I love that it’d deserve its own post, but the short version is: it feels like the exact opposite of Instagram. Its pace is blissfully slow, with people posting one or two photos per day, if that many. "Appreciations" replace likes and are visible only between the giver and receiver. It's user-supported, built to last rather than for endless growth.
Glass made me believe there's value in social media, if done right. So, I’m giving Mastodon another shot. The web interface is looking a lot sharper than it did a year or two ago. Ivory is a beautiful client. The social.lol instance is great; all the people I follow on RSS use Mastodon. It has the feel of something that's learned from Twitter's lessons and made something a little bit better. It can be an overwhelming firehose if that’s what you want, but by default, it's slower and more deliberate.
As the world speeds up, I keep finding myself retreating into slowness, embracing it as the only thing that can save my sanity, and increasingly believing it's the only thing that can save us all.
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