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Today I want to talk about my experience with social media (as the title might suggest).
I remember that I first came in contact with a social-media-like platform at age 10, it was shortly after I got my first smartphone. It was the social-media part of an image-editing app, I cannot recall it's name. You were basically able to share the pictures you have edited, and you could see, like and comment on other people's pictures. (instagram in a nutshell, I guess). I really liked it and I started taking pictures of everything, putting a cheap filter on them, and publishing them. I got quite a few likes and it felt awesome, but soon my parents started noticing that I was taking pictures of everything and then they looked at my phone and prohibited me to use this app again, I was really sad and then they explained to me what "fishing for compliments" was and I kinda understood. After that I didn't really come in contact with any social media for a really long time.
After a while I discovered YouTube and I created an account and started making comments on videos, but I wouldn't really call that a social media platform unless you are a content creator so let's move on.
Approximately at age 12 my best friend at that time told me about Memes, and told me about reddit, so I kept bugging my parents so they'd allow me to download it (parental control on my iPhone SE at that time) and eventually they allowed me. So I started joining some subreddits, I remember r/thinkpad r/unity r/unity3d r/memes and a few others, and I would start commenting as I usually did. But after a while, I started seeing posts on r/thinkpad of people presenting their old thinkpads, so I thought, hey I can do that too, I might get some karma! And so I did, I posted a picture of my thinkpad and got almost 1000 upvotes, and a ton of comments, and I happily replied to all of them. Then I started using reddit like a forum, and everything went rather smoothly for many months, but then I got my MacBook, and I started posting all kinds of pictures of it and my setup in general, again, getting tons of upvotes and comments. And soon after I started my "macOSMavericksTheme" project, in short, making a theme for macOS Mojave to make it look like Mavericks by editing system files. I spent 2 weeks, everyday just working on it just so in the end, I could post a status update on r/mac. This got me 'tons' of followers (56 to be exact) and tons of upvotes and comments and I felt amazing, sadly, right after I "finished" that project, I switched to Linux, fulltime. Thx TheAssassin and freem and #blue-nebula for motivating me to do this :D. And a few months after I discovered i3, and naturally, I started posting on r/unixporn, which again, got me quite a few likes and comments, and it felt awesome, so everytime I would distrohop, I made a new theme, hoping to get lots of karma on reddit. Then, I got catious about privacy and purged my reddit account.
Somewhere in between starting to use reddit and purged reddit, I used twitter, but not much and I just deleted the app one day and that was it, basically.
Now, Fosstodon. I only started using it a few weeks ago, and I started off with posting a picture of my setup. I got a few "likes" (or favourites, or whatever) and a few followers, I was surprised that getting followers was that easy on fosstodon. So I started posting more and more things, projects I was/am working on, random thoughts, from time to time a screenshot. And I got a TON of followers, this was probably mostly due to SWT (Simple Web Translator), SimpleerTube and SimplyNews. At the time of writing this, I have 74 followers, which is quite a substantial amount in my humble opinion. But I myself don't follow many other people because I don't wanna spend too much time just scrolling through fosstodon. I have noticed that my computer became my day instead of being part of my day, meaning, I wake up, I open up my computer, check fosstodon and XMPP, I go and eat breakfast, I go to my computer, work, and after a few hours, I go to bed again. I think this really unhealthy behavior and I want to improve that. What I really like about fosstodon is that you don't have this concept of "karma" like reddit does, because that way I am not tempted to make posts that get a ton of likes and stuff, but rather, stuff people like and boost.
I think I have a way healthier relationship with social media than most people do, especially nowadays because I don't have a smartphone so I am not constantly checking fosstodon while I am away from my computer. But I can definitely improve my way to handle fosstodon, i.e. I used to have a fosstodon tab open in my browser all day long, but today i started closing it when I wanted to get work done, which has proven to be very effective. I also forced myself to go and eat breakfast FIRST before I go and turn on my computer to check fosstodon. I had thoughts about deleting fosstodon but I realised that it was a great way to promote and present my projects, and if it's only for that, I'll keep it.
I want to stay on as few social media platforms as possible, that means, only fosstodon/mastodon, I will try to keep the random thoughts posts down to a minimum and will not scroll through mastodon for extensive time periods.
I don't know if this has been useful or interesting to read, but this is my blog after all :D
Again, if you managed to get to the end of this .. *scrolls through the file* pretty lengthy blog post, thank you, and have an awesome day :)
If you want to comment or give your opinion on this feel free to contact me
XMPP: me@metalune.xyz
E-Mail: me@metalune.xyz
Matrix: @metalune:sigmaa.ems.host
Mastodon: @metalune@fosstodon.org