💾 Archived View for tanelorn.city › ~matthew › posts › 2020 › still-around.gemini captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:07:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I recently deleted my accounts on mastodon.art, cute.science, and fosstodon.org.
Yesterday, I created new accounts on fostodon.org and writing.exchange.
I deleted them today.
This weekend I created a Twitter account, and deleted that yesterday too.
The Fediverse hasn't sparked joy in a long time, so it was KonMariâ„¢ time.
It wasn't any particular person or post that set me off. I just haven't been sleeping well lately, and looked at how I was wasting time online. I wasn't happy with what I saw, so I said to my cat, "Fuck this. I'm done."
I thought things would be better on the Fediverse. Maybe they are for some people (and I'm happy for them), but being there hasn't been better for *me*.
The greatest irony of our age is that some of the people for whom high school was a purgatory have turned the entire internet into a worldwide high school. Everwhere you go there are popularity contests, cliques, people competing for attention, and drama.
Maybe it's the nature of the beast. I've seen others suggest that any semblance of community one might find online is an illusion, and that the only real community one can have is made of people you can actually meet walking through your neighborhood. I don't much care for that idea; a community based on physical proximity is subject to the tyranny of geography, but I've never been especially good at any kind of community, whether online or physical.
Now that I've gotten into the Gemini protocol, I've found that I just don't have the patience for any of the bullshit endemic to modern social media any longer. I miss the old internet, and would rather have a place on the smol internet than a popular Fediverse account.
If anybody has noticed that I pulled another disappearing act and wondered if I'm OK:
My mostly leaving the Fediverse is an act of self-care. I'm getting older and more selfish, and I only want to do internet on *my* terms. That means posting on Gemini instead of social media, and communicating exclusively by email. That means participating in mailing lists. It might also mean using the post-by-email functionality write.as provides to put Gemini posts on the web (and the fediverse)—hence my use of "mostly", but that depends entirely on how convenient the process is for me.
If this post provokes a reaction, by all means link to it and quote it in your reply. If you want to remain in touch, send email to <contact@matthewgraybosch.com>.