Trying To Leave Microblogging

On the whole, I tend to be fairly negative about social media. The only social media I’ve had without fail over the past decade is LinkedIn, and that’s only continued to exist because I treat it more as an online resume than a social network; I’ve never actually posted to my timeline on LinkedIn, and rarely to I look at anything that appears on my timeline from my followers. It’s just a tool that I’ve used to get jobs before.

That being said, I’ve used a lot of social media platforms. I’ve previously been a heavy user of:

• MySpace
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Gnu Social
• Tumblr
• Mastodon
• Bluesky
• Instagram
• Google+

There are probably others I’m not even remembering, and I’m intentionally not mentioning that were particularly short-lived, like Pownce. Astute social media users will likely notice a trend toward microblogging for the majority of platforms I’ve used. As someone who has enjoyed blogging since my first Blogger account back before it was acquired by Google, I’ve found microblogging to scratch an itch for things that weren’t worthy of a full blog post but that I felt like needed to be posted on the Internet for whatever silly reason.

For various reasons, though, I’ve historically found myself trying to shy away from social media. Some of those reasons were fairly obvious; I’ve always had a special contempt for social media that’s disrespectful of online privacy. That means I haven’t touched anything by Meta like Facebook and Instagram for over a decade now because I refuse to feed a company every scrap of information about myself by installing their apps. In other cases, I came to dislike various platforms for technical reasons, such as Xitter (pre-acquisition) for crippling their API and for forcing an algorithmic view of their timeline.

In other instances, though, I just found myself wanting to spend less time looking at social media. Things like old school Xitter, Gnu Social, Mastodon, etc. were all enjoyable, but I didn’t like how much time I spent checking on them. As a result, I’ve had dozens of accounts across these platforms over the years as I’ve gone through the cycle of:

1. I love using these platforms.
2. I may spend too much time on these platforms.
3. I’m nuking my accounts on these platforms.
4. I’m kind of bored.
5. I miss the information I used to get.
6. Let’s remake my account(s)!

I recently realized I was hitting another crescendo with spending too much time on social media, with my primary platforms being Mastodon and Bluesky. I decided to step back and see what happened if I didn’t use them for a while. As a result, I stopped using my accounts on both platforms for about a month and a half, though I didn’t actually delete them. The results were fairly interesting to me.

The immediate impact was that I found myself less inclined to think in terms of framing whatever I was doing in a social media post. Despite the fact that I’ve never been “prolific” on social media, under the hood my mind is always breaking whatever I’m doing into microblogging-esque chunks in order to assess if it’s worthy of a post. While I still had those inclinations for a while, they eventually stopped, and it was nice to just be in the moment. It’s something that I already try to be mindful of (e.g. I never take photos and videos at concerts because I try to focus on experiencing it in the moment), but it’s funny how often thoughts about social media “content” sneak in. Before long, I didn’t really miss making random quips about whatever thing was going on in my life.

However, there was also a very noticeable downside, which is that I felt like I was missing out on a lot of good news and information. As a person who has spent his entire adult life working on tech and being interested in tech longer than that, I tend to curate my social media experience to a very tech-savvy crowd. As a result, microblogging feeds a lot of great tech news and happenings my way. If I stay away from microblogging, I don’t have another means by which to get the same information. While it may be easy to think you can just follow a site like Hacker News and call it a day, the fact of the matter is that nothing is going to spread great information about new tech happenings like the people working on it.

Ultimately, while a break from microblogging was nice, I decided to go back to it for the wealth of news and information available from people I follow. If I only used microblogging to follow nonsense and meme accounts, then I would like to think the outcome would be different. Considering I use it to stay on top of things like happenings in the Django community, though, not participating meant that I was losing out on a lot of great information.