Shmocial Shmedia
I’ve been thinking about social media and all that stuff recently. It’s boring and tiresome to think about. Thinking about it feels like re-visiting old patterns and habits. Old and tired ideas, needs, wants. Stuff that’s not very real, not very healthy. But I keep coming back to it anyway.
I know better.
I know that social media is not good for me. I’m not the kind of person that thrives there. Not in a success-sense. But in a survival-sense.
I don’t want to start talking about all that’s wrong with it. Because that would be me just being misanthropic. I think algorithms and corporations are to blame for the hellscape. But also it’s us too. Us- the end users, or creators of stuff on those platforms. We are also to blame.
Even platforms that seemingly have no algorithms are still very difficult for me. They still take a lot of energy, even after a few short minutes a week. Because I’m still thinking about it when I’m creating.
But last night I had one of the most brutal episodes of insomnia in a very long time. And in those long lonely hours my mind was spinning out. I realised after a while that one of the things I was ruminating on was social media. For me that means Mastodon and Bluesky.
And I was feeling very unhappy about the lack of connectivity between blogging and those platforms. How I want to be able to create in community. But that I want my blogs to be where I create, and social media where I go to be in community.
A service I use called Echofeed is a great facilitator of this, but is closing down soon. And this post is not about finding a replacement. I haven’t found anything that isn’t a compromise.
So last night I found myself ruminating again. And I realised that all of this is a roadblock to creating. And then I realised I need to stop using social media completely.
That last thought scared me a bit.
Because I want to be in community.
And then I remembered how blogging is supposed to be (for me). It’s supposed to be about self-expression though creating.
Somehow this has become reversed in my head: that I should be creating in order to express myself. It’s putting complexity and nonsense in front of the raw act of creating.
Like this post. This is how it should be.
I’m just writing. It’s going on my blog. But it wont be going out to socials. It won’t be going out to a Discovery feed. It won’t be findable on search engines. Why? Because it doesn’t matter. None of that matters.
Creating matters. Creating is the self-expression I need. Seems so obvious today.
I like that people might read this. I like that some of those are friends or acquaintances. I like that it might lead to a conversation.
But 99% of the good stuff has already happened when I hit publish. That’s where it’s at.
My thoughts and ideas about this trail off at this point. I’ll let this end here. Unresolved at the point where I might close my social accounts. I don’t know yet.
If you’re reading via RSS, thanks for keeping up with me. Appreciate it. And if you’re reading on the blog, thanks for stopping by.
RSS feeds update soon: I am expecting posting frequency to change on this blog. More on that and any changes to the RSS feeds will come soon. Thanks.