Mastodon

Over the years I’ve had an account on probably every social network. Remember Friendster? Plurk? Path?

I could never stick with any of them.

One problem was that none of my RL friends were big into them, except for Facebook which I hate. Plus most the interesting conversations were during the day (at least back then). I had work to do, I wasn’t going to sit around scrolling.

Another problem was that I had no interest in the trending topics. I do care about news but social networks wasn’t my first source. The crux of the problem was that either I didn’t have an opinion or I couldn’t figure out how to communicate them in 140 characters. That’s my fault.

With Instagram, I was never going to pics of myself. I don’t do selfies. Plus I sit behind a desk most days, how exciting is that? Wasn’t going to post pics of food. I’m pretty sure everyone has seen McDonalds fries already. On the flip side, I was getting jealous of what people were posting. I didn’t understand how they found the time to do it. Of course they were getting the likes and followers. The whole interaction system makes one depressed.

So I quit Instagram.

I’ve stayed away from social media for a couple of years. Honestly, I didn’t miss anything. Real-time conversations aren’t worth it generally. News sites will catch on to the important conversations and eventually write about them anyway.

What I missed was discovery…discovering new sites, apps, projects, etc. that others found interesting. That is something hard to search for.

Being attracted to shiny new things, I have decided to try out Mastodon. The distributed nature makes it challenging to find people but it has been productive. Found interesting conversations and cool things to try out.

Also, the instances are pretty uncensored. Not going to run into the usual Twitter and Facebook fiascos. But also will ocassionaly end up seeing NSFW images too in public timelines. So there is that.