I'm Done with Social Media

This has been brewing in the background ever since I joined Mastodon via Fosstodon. I think I’m done for good with social media.

Background

I joined Facebook back in the day when it was invite only by having a university address. Then it felt exclusive, interesting, and new. We didn’t know what was in store for the future, but it was an exclusive ways for us to communicate without having our parents part of it. I think I even encouraged my then girlfriend, now wife, to get on the platform. Oh the younger naiver days of youth.

I actually didn’t do much on Facebook. Mostly could read what other people were doing and occasionally change stuff on mine. Over time, my wife used it more and more and I used it less; with the exception when I was at Epic. I just found myself mindlessly perusing it for something else just to look at. At the time I didn’t realize I was wanting escapism from work, but I recognized that the habit was unhealthy. I then deleted my Facebook account for good and haven’t looked back.

Being Pulled Back In

Skipping forward quite a bit, I had been working on Reckoner for over a year and decided to get back on social media as a way to promote it and maybe network about other FOSS stuff. Fosstodon looked appealing. A Mastodon instance devoted to free and open source software, yay! I initially posted a bit about Reckoner. I even setup some code to take a Fosstodon post and link it as a comments section. I think I diligently posted about it for a month or two and then silence.

I suppose I should’ve known better. Why would anyone care about my tiny little project? Either way, I stopped posting about Reckoner and then started to follow more people. I ended up passively following people and consuming more, especially from my phone. I saw this pattern of passive consumption again and decided to start and actively post and respond to more on Fosstodon. I started to actively read the local timeline and reply to what I found interesting.

The Drama

Then there was the Fosstodon drama. I watched, I waited, and I thought that the response from Gina was measured. I tried doubling down on being more involved in the local timeline, but it was all a bit forced from me. Then there was drama round 2 when one of the new mods, Anachron, had to step down. There was a relative lack of information on what the offending post was and I didn’t think to check the way back machine. So I watched and waited for a response from Gina about it.

Then the response came. I was a bit disappointed in the response. My TLDR is that Anachron is point out that violent speech is violent speech and that advocating for the death of anyone is bad. He touches on A LOT of other topics with way too few words to properly express the thoughts he was trying to form. In the end, this leaves a lot of interpretation up to the reader to draw the conclusion they want to draw from it. Thus, many people drew the conclusion that he was far right sympathetic. I think he sounds like a free speech absolutist, but there isn’t enough material out there to really draw anything conclusive.

The Reflection

I thought about making another post about how I was disappointed in this response and finally going to move to another platform, but did I? The more I thought about it, the more I’ll just eventually get the same political drama out of another instance at some point in the future. Also, I don’t find myself engaging in using it for social media. I use Fosstodon more like a discoverable RSS feed. To be honest, I don’t want to read a 500 character take on something. I like longer treatises that people write on topics. I also prefer a parasocial relationship with a blogger/video essayist/author than the current climate of online social interactions. When it comes to the digital realm, I’d prefer to interact with your ideas/entertainment. If you want me to interact with you as a person, let’s meet in person or talk with a one-on-one interchange format (email, instant message, ect.).

My father made an off-hand comment that “everything is political” when I was trying to argue that something wasn’t. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I think I do now. Almost everything is political if humans are involved. Doubly so for social based interactions. The only thing I have found which tames a bit of a chaos is in-person interaction. It’s much harder to daemonize somebody if they’re staring at you face-to-face.

A Plea

As an aside, can we stop using the label Nazi? This has been leveraged against many far right groups and a few times against far left groups. The term is now meaningless due to the overuse and application to a large swath of people. Yes, some of the far right is analogous to the Nazi party in Germany in the 1930s. However, just because there are similarities, doesn’t make that card carrying Nazis. The Nazis are a political movement in Germany in the 1930s and some modern revival groups which literally adorn themselves with the same symbols. Labelling every far right group Nazis only denudes the word of any efficacy and makes it easy to deflect criticism as just name calling. Some will point to other definitions of the term, but I reject any definition but the above I have stated.

What I’m Doing Now

I was trying to get more collaboration and commiseration around the FOSS work I am doing. Similarly, just because you like something doesn’t mean you’ll find comradery in a group with that label. One of my many identities is that I am a FOSS advocate who programs side projects in Flutter. Many of the people you’ll find in FOSS communities are focused on other bigger languages (C, Rust, JavaScript, PHP, etc.). I think I’ll find a Flutter/Dart forum to join and become an active contributor there. There are very few Flutter people in Mastodon anyway. After all, it brings me more joy when people use my app and post something they desire as an issue on my Codeberg repo. At least then I’m getting the feedback that people are using the app and do like it, even if more work is needed.

I think another part of it is my personality. I don’t like the feeling I get being a passive consumer of social media. I also find posting to it take an inordinate amount of work for what should be random passing thoughts. People can differ with my opinions and social media might be a good thing in their life. Good for you. However, I think there is cohort of people for whom this is a net negative and don’t have the self-awareness to know it is bad for them.

I will still have a LinkedIn account. I rarely post or view anything on it, but I have been able to find jobs from LinkedIn. In that respect it still might serve some utility to me. Maybe I’ll just post my updates there…there’s definitely an expectation of self-promotion on the site.

With all that said, take care everyone! It’s a crazy world out there and it’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day shit that drops on a regular basis. Know yourself and your boundaries; make sure to enforce them.