in the wake of world events i feel like now is good a time as any to spill some of my thoughts about sns, and especially twitter
as i touched on briefly in my first vlog, i've grown an immense disgust at myself for how much time i've allowed myself to spend scrolling algorithmic feeds designed to hijack my dopamine receptors and clog my mental bandwidth with detritus and noise.
as a result of that, and in an effort to be kinder to myself, i've turned a lot of that self flagelation outwards and aimed it back at the institution of sns in general and i guess this blog is just me soapboxing a bit in an attempt to explain why i've been so offline lately.
for the longest time, it felt possible to use the tools built in to twitter to mute certain topics from appearing in my feed and i used them liberally to filter out garbage i didn't want to see when logging in. in so doing it became easier to spend time interacting with others on that platform, and just generally being Active: sharing updates about things i'm working on and joking around with friends whenever i felt compelled to. it felt important, or at least useful to the end of being known / being a public(ish) figure and generally getting the word out that I Exist, and to an extent i still do feel that way.
as it became easier to spend time on there, well this is almost stupid to say, but i started spending more time on there. i was posting something about once a day, and spending hours just letting myself look at the feed. i don't really know how to segue into where i'm going with this because it kind of happened suddenly, but i realized i was feeling incredibly anxious a lot more often. when i was looking at the feed, despite all my filters and mental barriers to shit i didnt want to see, i was still just feeling upset and driven by this intangible drive to scroll just a little bit more. and when i would try and pull myself away i felt like i was at worst abandoning my friends, and at best dissapearing entirely. these feelings started leaking in to my real life friends and i honestly started acting on impulses driven by this anxiety in ways that i've never had such a difficult struggle with before.
and that leads us to now, basically!
this shit sucks! and it's working exactly as intended. we've known this independently and collectively forever, but yet there is still this impulse among those who have yet to rip themselves away to keep interacting with it anyway. i've seen friends over the years pull the plug on it and say how much better they feel and while i understood it intellectually, it still didn't feel like something i needed to do, if that makes any sense.
there's a lot of talk about twitter-alternatives, and the indie web revival in the wake of a seeming growing discontent with corporate social media, especially in the wake of cohost's demise. and in the wake of this election people seem more eager than ever to finally divest themselves from elon's misery bot ridden ai web 3.0 nightmare and moving to places like bluesky, or to a lesser extent, the fediverse.
as far as bluesky is concerned, i personally do have an account there, and please feel free to follow me there if you're so inclined. but that said my personal divestment from social media has less to do with the problems specific to twitter (although they do factor in) and more to do with the entire infinite feed experiment itself. in short, i'm sick of the whole thing! i don't want to spend any more of my life than i have to gazing in to the abyss, and so i'm not going to.
and for the so-called indie web revival, as laid out way more eloquently than i could on n0thanky0u's recent blog post about this topic, i think calling it the indie-web is playing into the hands of corporate interest. maybe its just because of my age, but to me personal sites and forums / boards are the web. they never went anywhere even as more and more of us tried our hands at using sites like twitter and instagram. there is a question of accessibility when it comes to personal sites and especially with forums (and not so much in terms of accessibility as it relates to people with disabilities, as making the web more accessible in that sense is an extremely imporant and Good goal to always keep in mind), i otherwise think that a little bit of gatekeeping is a good thing. people seem extremely wanting for something to become the new main meeting ground for everything because of the inherant inacessibility of the web as it exists external to twitter-like places, i.e.: needing to learn a forum's culture, or needing to learn html / css to run a blog / join a webring. and i guess i just take issue with this because learning new modes of interaction, and learning new skills especially are things i value extremely highly, and pushing people away from that because the alternative requires less friction to engage with is something i'm not interested in perpetuating.
i'm not going to be 'coming back' to twitter, or start using bluesky in the same ways that i was before. doing this is difficult since frankly i love being able to talk about and share things i'm working on in a frictionless way. but it's just not worth the cost for me anymore. i probably won't delete my accounts there or go 100% radio silent, but that might change.
if you ever want to contact me directly, you can always shoot me an e-mail (listed on the homepage). i also am going to keep using discord despite having similar problems with it as i do with twitter/bluesky/instagram, but i am way more hesitant to give that out since i dont like the pressure of quick responses, especially to people i don't know, that discord and other things like it operate in the space of. so yeah, EMAIL ME! if you DO know me and want to chat on discord, e-mail me with your discord username and i'd genuinely love to chat.
otherwise if you'd like to keep up with my projects, follow my rss feed if you have the means, if you don't and would still like to know when i update this site, follow my neocities page which exists only to provide another way of sharing when i make updates here! if you don't have a neocities page, id highly encourage you to try it out. it's fun! finally, i'll still be vlogging on youtube whenever struck by the urge, so plees like coment and subeirebe.
sorry this was so long and i basically just spun in circles the whole time and expounded on things you could probably assume about me, but hey that's what i'm here for. :)
as a final note, i encourage you to do everything conceivable in your power to build a local community for yourself. i shouldn't have to explain why. it might seem impossible but please, please try. no one is going to fall out of the sky and save you, unfortunately. i only have friends because i put myself out of my comfort zone, i promise you it's worth the initial pain.
love u be safe see u next time byebye!