the mellow tigger's musings

They're wrong.  Social media is not ending.  It's still getting started.  I'm confident that we'll find a way that works helpfully for us.  "The beginning is near."  My first rule of all media platforms: turn off all notifications.

I submitted a suggestion yesterday to dw_suggestions that they add Mastodon service here at their domain.  Why can't a site offer both long-form blogging and microblogging at once?  One account could get you credentials for both forms.  It would certainly simplify the server choice problem on Mastodon, and it would offer free advertising for Dreamwidth every time someone here posted something that got boosted to the fediverse.  It solves the problem of creating unwieldy threads on microblogs with character count limits.  It seems like a good idea to me, but I can't tell from their blog if any moderators are still checking submissions.  The last entry there is from 2018.  :/  And I see you there in 2017, siderea.

If somebody has only 1 service, then I like and appreciate when they post all of their thoughts there.  Doctors have cats, community activists have children, and scientists have gardens.  I think it's good and wholesome to depict all of oneself online.  But if separation is possible (that's what I always hoped the Google Plus circles would someday become), then I think that could also be healthy.  Why not have separate feeds for politics, pandemic, sex, and religion?  Some people just post way too much about single topics (hello, "Moody Monday" tradition), and some separation would help to reduce the firehose that demands attention.  This benefit is a corollary to the technological telepathy that I'm always predicting.

For instance, I was in the habit of using MeWe to post my #WarzoneInMinneapolis hashtag occasionally when I am particularly bothered by local gunfire.  I should probably create a Mastodon account just for that?  Somewhere to shout alone into the aether that I'm stressed, without the intention of actually interacting with anyone.  Just to create the historical record.  Like here with long form blogging, it's easier though not strictly necessary to organize the thoughts in my own head by acknowledging them externally.

I dropped Twitter completely yesterday in the #Musk2Tusk migration, even uninstalling the app from my smartphone and logging out from my web browser.  It was obvious all along that Musk's $8chan plan would destroy Twitter, plenty of people knew this would happen, and it will only get worse.  The "tech bro" blew $44 billion to destroy a platform.  Billionaires should not exist.  I made the last tweet on my main account October 28th and on my SARS-CoV-2 alt November 10th.  This reminds me a lot of abandoning Facebook over a decade ago, and losing Google Plus a few years ago.

I recreated my main and my alt on Mastodon:
I'll post another day about important tricks to using the platform well.  It is obscure, sometimes.  It is not simply a clone of Twitter.  I'll wait until I've learned a few more useful lessons from it.