Social media doesn't make me happy any more
Social media used to make me happy! LiveJournal was my first love, but Twitter's where I grew up.
And when Twitter was good, it was incredible! Before the ragebait took over, it was goddamn cosy at times. You didn't have to guard yourself constantly. You could risk baring your soul a little bit. You'd never believe it today, but folk actually replied to lift you up. I've never again felt the sense of community that I had on Twitter.
It didn't last forever, of course. The Trust and Safety team stopped turning up years before Musk took over. A ton of my creative friends left to focus on Instagram. A bunch of folk with families decided to stick with Facebook. The capital-I capital-W Indie Web cats upped-sticks to Mastodon. The minor celebrities started up Substack newsletters. Threads hoovered up a few more, and the rest jumped to Bluesky. A handful didn’t mind staying to hang at the Nazi bar, and I miss them too.
Mastodon
Personally, I went all-in on Mastodon. I loved that it was open-source! I loved that it was decentralised! I loved that it leaned-left, queer and creative! And… well, yeah.
Every instance was a nightmare in its own way. Many turn blind eyes to hate speech if the moderators are mates with the perpetrators. Racism is rife, and I don't see it getting any better. I got a ton of transphobic hate from queer-friendly instances that they never tackled because it was "just jokes". I tried a game development instance once, and the misogyny was off the scale — and protected by the admin.
And--oh boy--the tone policing is off the charts. Heaven forbid you want to share the state of your mental health amidst the erosion of trans rights in the UK, because that makes the centrists feel uncomfortable and you better hide it under a content warning. Every time I shared a photo, I tried really fucking hard to get the alt text right, but I had a gang of pissed-off advisors stalking my uploads to tell me if they thought I was doing it wrong. A gang--I add--who couldn't even decide between themselves what the "right" text should be. One time, they even started scrapping in my replies over it.
I stopped posting in the end, because nothing I had to say was worth the public shaming for not being good enough.
Bluesky
So then I tried Bluesky. And shit, it’s soulless. Utterly soulless. Sure, you can curate a feed of the news you’re interested in, but it may as well just be an RSS feed. It’s just a stream of press releases and links to merchandise. I tried being the change I wanted to see, but folks don't want to talk. They just want to promote.
And good lord, if you’ve never used Bluesky then you don’t know the horror of the self-reboost. You can boost your own posts, over and over and over again. Follow someone who does this, and you’ll get a repeat of their timeline three times a day, “for the Americans just waking up” and “for the Europeans just waking up”. It’s soulless, self-promotional gas.
I tried posting about my game development a few times. Those posts always got attention, but only from bots reposting anything to do with game development. I wanted to make new friends and talk about the cool stuff we’re building, but I was just burning carbon for other peoples’ clout.
Blogging
I’m done with it all. I’m done with the noise and the clout and not being good enough. This blog is a fucking personal space where I can be calm, deliberate and journal honestly about my hopes, fears, successes and failures without someone telling me I'm doing it wrong.
❤️