Tuba 0.11 adds full Mastodon quote and Collections support, UnifiedPush and an early, experimental Android build. Linux's best Mastodon app, now better!
You're reading Tuba, the best Mastodon client for Linux, just got a BIG update, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Tuba 0.11 adds full Mastodon quote and Collections support, UnifiedPush and an early, experimental Android build. Linux's best Mastodon app, now better!
You're reading Tuba, the best Mastodon client for Linux, just got a BIG update, a blog post from OMG! Ubuntu. Do not reproduce elsewhere without permission.
Twitch now lets users opt out of Amazon's use of content from their channels to train Amazon's "generative AI content models." The change, announced today, comes more than two years after a company executive confirmed that Amazon was using Twitch content for AI training.
In an updated support page, Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their “streams, VODs, clips, stream chats, and pictures and text on your channel [to] be used in future training of a model developed by Amazon whose purpose is to generate or synthesize text, audio, images, or video.”
To opt out, users must go to the proper settings at www.twitch.tv/settings/security.
© Omar Marques/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. But when it comes to AI slop and hateful content threatening the safety and value of social media platforms, adding more fire—in this case, more AI—can make the problem worse.
At its best, social media can be a haven for people who want to share their experiences and knowledge. It gets closest to this ideal when users contribute authentic, valuable content, whether that’s a uniquely thoughtful blog post or a helpful video on how to build a PC. Relying primarily on AI tools to preserve that authenticity misses what makes social media worthwhile in the first place: the people behind it.
In April, a Slack channel for moderators of the r/AskHistorians Reddit community was usually busy. The channel, which automatically receives links to modmail messages, was flooded with alerts after dozens of comments and posts dating back 10 years were automatically removed from the subreddit.
© Getty
Old.reddit.com’s days appear to be numbered.
Reddit has strayed from saying that it will shutter the website, which many long-time Redditors prefer for its layout, navigation, and fewer feed recommendations.
In a blog post today, Reddit made a vague statement about upcoming “changes” to Old Reddit:
© Kirill Kudryavtsev / AFP via Getty Images)
Elon Musk has settled his lawsuit with advertisers that he once claimed should be criminally prosecuted for refusing to advertise on his social media platform, X.
In a joint statement that reveals little about the deal, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and X said that they were “putting the litigation involving the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) behind them.”
X sued the WFA in 2024, shortly after a series of brands boycotting X caused the platform's revenue to drop by $1.5 billion by the end of 2023. Musk became upset, declaring “it is war” on X about eight months after he told advertisers who refused to buy X ads to “go fuck yourself.”
© Pool / Pool | Getty Images Europe
In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu.
His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling in the single digits, stunned observers by winning the election’s first round with 23 percent of the vote.
In the Netherlands, Adriana Iamnitchi was watching closely. As chair of computational social sciences at Maastricht University, she leads the research into disinformation campaigns. She wanted to know how pro-Georgescu content was being monetized on TikTok through hidden influencer marketing and livestreamed political content.
© Getty Images | Photographer is my life
This week, the Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) won a key battle in its fight to reverse a visa-restriction policy that the Trump administration had used to attempt to revoke green cards and deport non-US citizens who work on misinformation, disinformation, fact-checking, content moderation, compliance, and trust and safety.
In an opinion published Tuesday, US District Judge James Boasberg granted a preliminary injunction blocking the State Department from enforcing the policy until the CITR’s lawsuit is resolved.
On its face, the policy does not require visa denials or deportations. Instead, it authorizes immigration investigations into individuals suspected of helping foreign adversaries attempt to manipulate public opinion by suppressing US speech.
© UCG / Contributor | Universal Images Group
The European Union is ramping up pressure on Meta to make big changes to Facebook and Instagram after the European Commission preliminarily found that features like autoplay, infinite scroll, and highly personalized content recommendations were addictive.
On Thursday, the EC said its investigation indicated that “Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical and mental wellbeing of users, including minors and vulnerable adults.”
“These features fuel the user's urge to keep scrolling and shift the brain into ‘autopilot mode,' contributing to unhealthy habits and compulsive use,” the commission said.
© NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto
TikTok's For You Page (FYP) is the default home screen for users of the video-sharing platform. It's a personalized, algorithmically driven content feed, but the approach differs from other social media in that TikTok's algorithm relies heavily on implicit signals—such as how long users watch particular videos—as well as explicit signals such as likes or follows. And generally, that algorithm does remarkably well at predicting which videos will interest particular users.
But some users have voiced concerns that TikTok's almighty algorithm doesn't seem to incorporate negative feedback very well. Even when they don't watch a suggested video or click the "not interested" feature, they keep seeing those videos on their FYP. Northeastern University computer scientists put those suspicions to the test. According to their recent paper, the engagement signals do have an effect, but only temporarily. Then the algorithm gradually relapses unless a user consistently gives the same feedback over and over again.
The research group specializes in "algorithm audits," co-author Piotr Sapiezynski told Ars, to better understand online platforms: "how they work, how they fail, when they fail, how they harm individuals and societies." In this case, he and his co-authors wanted to take a closer look at user agency after hearing multiple anecdotal reports from TikTok users that their negative feedback—responding to prompts by indicating they aren't interested or want to see less of a certain kind of video—doesn't seem to remove those posts from their FYP. "On the other hand, it's unclear why the platforms would offer it, if it doesn't work," said Sapiezynski.
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
Reddit will start requiring people to be logged into Reddit to use old.reddit.com.
The new requirement will take effect “over the next month,” a Reddit employee going by the username boat-botany announced on the social media platform today. The person claimed that the change is part of an ongoing effort to “tighten how automated systems access Reddit.”
The Reddit employee wrote:
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You also have to jump through hoops to sell it and account for it.
When was the last time you bought something from the person who made it? A piece of pottery, a wooden jewelry box, a framed painting, a hand-bound notebook, a leather wallet, a pair of earrings?
Do you have any idea what went into that item, from the moment it was imagined by the artist to the moment you took possession of it?
My friend Janet LeRoy has been painting mostly wildlife on turkey feathers for longer than the 30 years I’ve known her. When people ask her how long it takes to do a photo, she tells them 40 years — that’s the amount of time it has taken her to hone her craft to where she is today.
Let’s look at the skills required, which is probably the least considered piece of this puzzle. Babies don’t emerge from the womb knowing how to make things. Their ability to creatively design and then construct a piece of art is something learned over years. Sure, some of it might be natural — lots of people (but not me) seem to have an eye for drawing or making music. But most folks, no matter what their natural skills seem to be, need training and practice to hone those skills. A kid has to come a long way from drawing with crayons in kindergarten to painting fine art images with acrylics on turkey feathers.
The next time you browse an art show, take a moment to consider the kinds of skills the artist needed to hone to make what you see in her booth. Think about how she got them. Maybe it’s self-taught with years and years of practice. Or maybe she took often expensive hands-on classes. (I did a bit of both.)
Now consider the often specialized tools and equipment. I bet you can’t even imagine half the tools a potter or a woodworker or a jewelry artist uses to make their artwork. Next time you’re at an art show, if an artist you admire isn’t too busy, take a moment to learn more about the tools and equipment they use in their studio.
Two color-matched Pietersite stones double bezel set in sterling silver. I made everything in this photo except the stones. (I’d rather make jewelry than polish stones.) You can find my work in my online shop.
Here’s a photo of a pendant I finished yesterday, and here’s a run-down of the tools and equipment I used to make it:
All together, this is about $2,000 worth of equipment. And it doesn’t include the the thousands of dollars of other equipment I use in other work. Not only did I have to acquire all of these tools, but I had to learn how to use them properly. (I’m still working on the Smith Little Torch.)
Rio Grande, my jewelry supply provider, keeps up-to-date pricing information for all precious metals right on its website.
And then there are the materials. I had sticker shock this morning when I checked the price of sterling silver; it’s up more than 100% in two years. Thank heaven I stocked up earlier this year and have enough to take me through the winter. I’ll need to have a few good shows before I stock up again. I’m fortunate that I now have enough cabochons in my collection to last the rest of my life. (Buying stones is a bit of an addiction for me.)
Now I’m getting into monetary costs and I really didn’t mean to go there. So let’s take a turn back to what prompted me to write this post: updating my jewelry business online shop.
The point is, it’s not enough to be creative and have the skills and tools and materials to turn ideas into a piece of art. Today’s artists need to be able to sell that art to keep making it. And that means they’re usually in charge of marketing and sales — after all, how many artists can afford to hire someone to handle that for them?
Marketing, to me, means mentioning my work on social media, trying (and mostly failing) to keep a website up-to-date, photographing all my new work. I’m lucky (or stupid) because I’m only on one social media platform — Mastodon — so I’m not dealing with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or Tik Tok. (I occasionally put videos on YouTube, but since losing my login information for my jewelry account, that’s been a bit difficult.) I simply can’t see spending hours of every day promoting my work on social media when I should be making the work I have to promote.
Sales means applying to and then attending often costly art shows with setup and teardown that suck the physical life out of me. Even just sitting in my booth all day, eating snacks out of a little cooler and having to rely on other artists to keep an eye on things when I run to the restroom to take a leak can be exhausting. Heck, when I do the Leavenworth WA show some weekends, my day is 11 to 14 hours (long door to door), depending on whether it’s a setup day. The show I’m attending in Seattle soon is costing me more than $800 for a 10 x 6 foot space; do you know how much jewelry I have to sell to cover that? (At least it’s indoors.)
Sales also means updating an online shop. I know a lot of folks use Etsy and depend on it for sales. I don’t. I’m tired of them taking such a large chunk of my revenue and displaying my work among so much cheap crap. I’m tired of having to maintain two inventory systems that I have to manually sync up when I make or sell something. I’m tired of giving money to an organization that misleads buyers and sellers. And when you shop there, have you ever stopped to consider how much sellers have to jack up their prices to make a profit after Etsy takes its fees?
So I have my own Square-based shop. It’s free to set up and use; the only fee is the standard credit card fee I pay when a sale is made. But it still takes time to update the site with photos and descriptions when I make new items or sell items outside the square system.
Did I mention that I have to be a photographer, too? Yep. I have to take decent photos of all of my work. I do the best I can, but I’m not pretending it’s good. It’s passable. (Yesterday I considered hiring someone to do it. But I quickly realized I didn’t have the budget to pay someone else to do it.)
And did I mention that I also have to account for all my sales? And file sales tax returns for every state I sell in? So yes, I have to be an accountant, too. (Good thing I got that accounting degree back in the 1980s.)
So I guess that what I’m trying to say is that unless an artist is independently wealthy and can make art for fun, there’s a lot more to making art than just making art.
Think about that the next time you see original artwork available for sale.
Day 1 of my effort to keep off social media was a success. Here’s Day 2.
As I reported yesterday, I’ve decided to take a break from social media and put everything I would have posted on Mastodon in a blog post. I’ve come away with two conclusions:
I did find myself in social media withdrawal, where I saw or thought something I wanted to share and reached for my phone but then remembered I was off social media and put it down. It’s not quite as easy to step over to the computer and add a social media style post, as I did yesterday and will begin doing shortly today.
Social media apps make it too convenient to participate. No wonder we see so many people with their heads down looking at their phones. I’ve managed to avoid that when I’m with other people, but it’s hard to avoid it when I’m alone, waiting for a meal at a restaurant or just taking a break between other tasks.
Anyway, here are today’s posts, for what they are worth.
Saturday, March 22, 2025 9:16 AM Started my second day without checking social media. Yesterday was not quite as difficult as I thought it would be, but I did miss interaction with my friends there.
Saturday, March 22, 2025 9:20 AM Gorgeous day. Temperatures should get into the 50s, although the wind is supposed to kick up again later. This is our windy season, so that’s no surprise. I’m hoping to finish cleaning the boat’s aft cockpit lockers so I can start loading required equipment and spares back into them. I’ll be taking it to Bellingham on Tuesday.
Saturday, March 22, 2025 9:25 AM The sun is coming through my front windows for the first time this year. That means the sun has moved far enough north to clear the cliffs early enough to shine into the east side of my house. My calendar notes said this would happen next Wednesday, but apparently it was cloudy every day until 3/25 on the year I made the note. (Yes, I track the sun movements in relation to my home.)
Saturday, March 22, 2025 11:18 AM I got about 2 hours of work done on my Great Loop book. Between editing Thursday’s work and adding new text (mostly from my blog), I have a net addition of 3,017 words, which just meets my 3,000 word goal. The sun is out on the boat so it’s time to get some more chores done out there.
Mousaka, just out of the oven.
Saturday, March 22, 2025 1:28 PM Did some boat cleaning. The cockpit lockers are pretty dirty on the bottom and aren’t coming as clean as I’d like. I hope my work satisfies the charter company. If not, I’m prepared with Kilz and a good outdoor paint roughly the same color as the painted wood locker floors and can do it in Bellingham. 1/2
I took a break to make lunch: a Paleo Mousaka that I really like. The paleo part comes from the “cheese” on top being made with coconut milk, arrowroot flour, and an egg. This is one of my favorite recipes and it freezes well. I make it with lamb, as it should be made. 2/2
Saturday, March 22, 2025 2:05 PM FedEx Ground, which is now delivering to my home perfectly, brought some bookbinding paper I was waiting for. I’ll be using it to create a hand-bound guest book for my boat. I’ll do the printing this afternoon.
And that’s all I fake posted about yesterday. I know I would have posted more online — I kept very busy yesterday and had a lot to share — but having to sit at my computer to type in the content of a post made it inconvenient. I’d rather get stuff done.
But in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? Does anyone really care what I have to say?
There’s a guy on Mastodon who posts all the time and doesn’t get much engagement with his posts. Recently, all of his posts have turned into whining complaints about how few likes and boosts he gets and how his follower count has become stagnant. As if he thinks he’s some sort of celebrity or “influencer” that people want to follow closely. He’s not.
And I’m not either. But I know that and accept it.
I’m there for the interaction, but there are so few who people I enjoy interacting with that I’m not sure it’s worthwhile anymore.
And yes, I know I blogged about this back in February. And I know it sounds like I’m whining now. So I’ll stop.
It’s Sunday morning and I’ll put this online and get back to regular blogging this week. Thanks for bearing with me during this experiment.
I start to think long and hard about my involvement in social media and whether it’s worth the time I spend on it. Maybe you should, too.
Back in the mid 2000s, I was at the height of my writing career. Churning out at least five books a year with two of them guaranteed bestsellers — well, “bestsellers” by tech book standards, anyway; I wasn’t arguing with my royalty checks — I was on the leading edge of so much end user level stuff. It seemed natural that I should dive into social media, which was so new at the time. I may have had an account on MySpace, but it was Twitter, which I joined in 2007, that really attracted me.
Back then, it was possible to view the entire system timeline just by going to Twittr.com. (Yes, in the very early days, there was no E. That was a popular naming trend back then. Drop the E in front of the R. Tumblr is another example.) You’d just go to that home page, read the tweets of people all over the world, and pick out the accounts you wanted to follow. I still follow the first person I followed on Twitter — although I follow him on Mastodon now. (More on that in a moment.)
Twitter became an important part of my lifestyle. It was my “office watercooler,” so to speak. I worked alone at a home office, working long, 12-hour days while on a book project and then taking time off to recharge before the next one. My future wasband either worked from his home office or back on the East Coast or, later, from an office down in the Phoenix area. (In the end, it got to be a sort of “job of the month club” for him, bouncing from one job to another. At the very end, it was hard to keep track.) Since my work was mostly solitary, each time I came up from a highly focused writing session for a brief rest before diving back in, I looked for someone to talk to. If my future wasband was busy or not around, I turned to my Twitter friends.
I started to build real-life friendships with some of these people. I met a surprising number of them in person. In those days, I was still traveling a bit for work and would make a point of meeting up with ones who lived at my work destination. Coffee. Lunch. Whatever. These people were folks I could chat with online during the day, cutting a bit of the loneliness out of my workday. We chatted about all kinds of things, from the weather and photography to travel and cooking. Just about anything. (That’s one of the benefits of being a polymath: you can find something to talk about with almost anyone.)
Also, pretty early on, when I was still producing video content for Lynda.com (not LinkedIn Learning), I wrote the very first video courses — or training material at all — about using Twitter. I think I revised that course two times before they pulled it away from me and handed it to in-house authors they didn’t have to pay royalties to. (And that wasn’t the only successful course they snatched away from me to bring in-house. They also took my WordPress course, which was a real money-maker for me for several years. I guess you can see why I won’t develop courses for them anymore.)
I also hopped onto Facebook around the same time, although my use of that service didn’t pick up until around 2010. I didn’t like it quite as much. It seemed juvenile. People posting sometimes idiotic, sometimes misleading memes created by others. There are only so many cat pictures a person can look at in a day. Not many original thoughts being shared. Actually, not much of anything that could be considered a “thought.” It also upset me to learn that several real-world friends and family members appeared to have Nazi leanings. Do I really need to know that? Sometimes ignorance really is bliss.
And then there was the time my sister, a life-long Republican, posted a pro-Democrat sentiment on her Facebook wall. My mother, in her infinite wisdom, had the nerve to lecture my sister, right there on Facebook for everyone to see. My sister deleted my mother’s comment and stopped talking to her for a while. I just blocked my mother. Who needs to worry about shit like that?
I might have hopped on LinkedIn before Facebook. In the beginning, LinkedIn looked like a serious social networking website where I might actually make connections to people who could move my careers forward. (Yes, back then I had two active careers: writing and flying helicopters.) But I never had any success making solid professional contacts there and couldn’t see any reason to duplicate personal content I was already sharing on other social media. And then the spam began; it got to the point that every time I connected to LinkedIn, the only new content directed to me was spam from people claiming to know someone I barely knew or had heard of, trying to sell me on their services.
In fact, sometime between 2010 and 2014, I started to realize that actively participating in three social media sites — Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn — was taking a lot of time and effort. More than I wanted to give. LinkedIn was mostly abandoned; I killed the account completely when the spam started arriving in my email inbox and I couldn’t seem to shut it off.
Fortunately, I never got sucked into Instagram, like so many other folks have, although I think I did set up at least once account. Again, I felt my hands were already full with the social media I “had” to be on. I did not want to lose more hours of my day building a presence somewhere else.
Ditto for TikTok — most of the content I’ve seen there is amateurish, juvenile, or both. I think TikTok is the perfect platform for today’s vapid population of low attention span, gullible people. I do believe China is (or will be) using it to sway popular opinion. It won’t surprise me at all if it works. Anyone willing to waste hours of their day on the kind of crap the algorithm serves them — no matter how “good” that algorithm is at predicting what people like — is already being led around by a leash.
Anyway, my publishers were thrilled that I had a social media presence. That presence was enhanced quite a bit when I earned a “verified” checkmark on my Twitter account. (Back in the day, verified meant that they’d checked your identity and you were who they said you were. Twitter only performed this service for people with a certain level of fame, which I’d achieved at the time through my writing. Heck, for a while I even had a Wikipedia page.)
Keep in mind, this is still before the word influencer began being used. Authors at my level weren’t influencers yet — and I don’t think I ever was one. But readers — potential and otherwise — could find us online and be “friends” with us. We could post about our work and people who followed us could learn about it. All without costing the publishers a single cent of their advertising budgets. All the work fell to the authors and it sometimes was quite a bit of work.
And this is how things remain today in the publishing world. Part of the author evaluation process is an examination of the author’s social media reach and content. It’s crazy because it forces authors to build an online presence that takes them away from their actual work. It also limits what an author can say on social media — one unpopular tweet can land an author in seriously hot water. (And I’m sure I could find at least six good examples of this, but since I’m writing this in the middle of the California desert with no cell signal, I can’t look now.)
Let’s fast-forward to the mid 2010s. By this point, I was pretty much addicted to participation in social media, including Twitter and Facebook. (I’d mostly given up on LinkedIn by then.)
My writing career had wound down — who buys computer how-to books these days? — and my flying career had taken off (no pun intended). I was happily divorced, living in a home I had built to my specifications on 10 acres of view property in Washington state. I was exploring new hobbies like beekeeping and, later, silversmithing. I had a great garden. I had a little jet boat I’d take out on the Columbia River. I had real-life friends who lived nearby in addition to my social media friends.
The need to keep my publishers happy by maintaining a social media presence had pretty much faded away. But still, I was spending hours every day with my nose in my phone or iPad, scrolling through Twitter and Facebook, clicking Like buttons and Retweet buttons and replying to posts I had something to say about.
It was around then that I started to realize that Facebook wasn’t showing me all of the posts by all of the people I followed. It was showing me a selection of them. If I went to the person’s wall — do they still call it that? — I would see what they’d posted, but I had no patience to do that for everyone I wanted to keep up with.
The posts that seemed to come up the most were political memes. Holy crap! How many hateful, usually misleading memes are out there? Are people so freaking stupid that they can’t comprehend a thought unless it’s 25 words or less in big type on a picture?
And then there were the ads. They never seemed to stop. But when they started showing me ads related to things I’d searched for on Google, I completely wigged out. Facebook was tracking my activity across the Internet and using that info to display advertisements for things it thought I might like. This had to stop.
In the meantime, Twitter grew exponentially and became the platform of choice for the news media to quote. Not a day went by when a television newscast didn’t include at least one tweet.
If you’re curious about how the algorithm used by social media companies affects what you see and how you feel about it, you really ought to check out Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture by Kyle Chayka. This book takes an extremely detailed look at how algorithms are used to addict us to social media and then manipulate us when we’re there. It’s full of real-life stories as examples.
I “read” it in audiobook format on a long drive and was really struck by a lot of things it covered, mostly because I’ve already seen examples in my own life and social media use. It has made me glad I’ve gotten off of algorithm-based social media platforms but has also made me think hard about the time I spend online.
And then I noticed that tweets weren’t appearing in the reverse chronological order I loved. And that tweets were missing. Twitter, like Facebook, was employing an algorithm that determined what it would show me and what order that content would appear in. Among ads. I found myself repeatedly going into settings to revert back to the chronological timeline of all the tweets by people I followed.
In the perfectly coined word by Cory Doctorow, social media — all social media — was becoming enshittified. After getting us addicted to their platforms, they were adding crappy “features” no one wanted to display advertising, change opinions, and collect information about us that they could sell to third parties. You know what they say: nothing is free. If you’re using a free service, maybe you’re the product they’re selling to someone else.
I knew what was going on and I didn’t want to be part of it. Something had to give.
After staying off Facebook for a whole year, I decided to delete my account. The hardest part about it was not losing touch with the few real friends I had there. It was knowing that the hours I’d spent participating on the service, giving them content that they might or might not show to the people who followed me, was time ultimately wasted. All that content would be deleted. Gone for good. (At least I hope so.)
I was down to just one social media account: Twitter.
My love affair — fueled, in part by addiction — for Twitter soured considerably when the Space Karen, Elon Musk, bought it. It didn’t take long for him to try to monetize it by allowing people to pay for a “verified” check mark and trying to force those of us who already had one to pay up to keep it. I elected not to pay and found myself suddenly unverified. I was no longer who I said I was?
My current profile on Mastodon.
I saw the way things were going — although I admit I never expected it to get as bad as it did. I set up an account on Mastodon, an open source platform that networks servers around the world, very much like the old Fidonet network my BBS was part of in the mid 1990s. Over time, I weaned myself off of Twitter and onto Mastodon. I fully expected it to meet my “watercooler” needs, bringing me a handful of friends I could chat with online no matter where I was.
Mastodon reminded me of Twitter when I first joined. No algorithm. Posts appear in reverse chronological order. I see every toot by everyone I follow — unless, of course, I blocked certain words or phrases with filters. I currently use filters extensively on Mastodon to block out as much political content as possible. I don’t need to follow politics on social media, where memes and desperate pleas attached to article links fill our minds with so much oversimplified crap.
When I learned my Twitter content was being used to feed AI systems, I wanted my 150,000+ tweets off Twitter. I paid TweetDeleter to do the job for me. Due to constraints on the Twitter platform, it took two months.
I set up Mastodon to automatically delete toots after a year. I had realized that nothing I shared online was so important that it needed to be kept forever. Life is fleeting, social media life is even more fleeting.
And this is where I am now:
And that brings me to the point of this post.
You see, even though I believe that Mastodon is my best option for participating in social media — keeping in mind that my solitary lifestyle gives me a need for the always attended “watercooler” for chatting with others — I’m finding myself less and less satisfied with it. Simply said, I don’t think it’s meeting my real need, which is thoughtful or amusing conversation.
If I wanted a distraction, I’d look at YouTube or do a crossword puzzle. Or, for Pete’s sake, work on one of my hobbies. (Did I mention that I recently started linocut and bookbinding? It never ends.)
But it’s not just distraction I want. I want meaningful conversation with intelligent people who don’t get bent out of shape if you don’t fully agree with everything they toot. People who aren’t sucked into current events so deeply that all they can do is whine about the current political landscape and share idiotic memes. People who can share a joke or provide insight about something I mentioned or share their own interesting experiences. People who aren’t so focused on the illusion of being a better human that all they can do is toot about the latest catastrophe or outrage that should make us sad or angry or frustrated and boost the toots of every out-of-luck user begging for money. People who don’t hate.
Am I getting that on Mastodon? Yes, to a certain extent. I fine-tune the accounts I follow daily, cutting out the ones who toot things I don’t want to see and turning off boosts for the ones who share everything they like, regardless of its more universal appeal. (The theory these people cling to is that they’re doing the original posters a favor by sharing instead of liking since there’s no algorithm to give them exposure. What they don’t realize is that they become one of thousands of algorithms, and that by sharing nearly everything, they’re filling our feeds with too much stuff.
I can count on two hands the accounts I interact with — keeping in mind that the only thing I want from social media is interaction. The rest is a steady stream of photographs that may or may not have been taken by the person who originally posted it. (I recently blocked the Pixelfed instance and that really cut back on the flood of photos. Enough remain.) And don’t get me started on the holier-than-thou mavens who find it necessary to tell us all how to toot and include alt text and use hashtags. I tell people how to mute and block people like that. ;-)
In general, however, social media is not serving me what I want to be served. It’s not filling the socialization gap in my life that’s inherent with living or traveling alone in a relatively remote area. And that’s got me wondering why I waste so much time on it.
The solution is easy:
While I don’t think any of these things will make my participation in social media more satisfying, I do believe that it’ll help break my addiction (because of less access) and help keep it from getting any more disappointing than it actually is.
The next step, of course, is dropping out of this last social media platform and staying off social media completely. But I don’t think I’m quite ready for that yet.
In the meantime, what do you think about your participation in social media? Is it giving you everything you want to need? Are you satisfied? Do you feel as if you’re using your social media time productively or wasting it?
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