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Decided I'll take a one/two/three month sabbatical from social media, which for me means I've signed out of Mastodon. It's not due to the US election, which has some other people taking time out. I'm still going to be consuming my fair share of political news and opinion, talking about it in other venues, and probably feeling depressed about all of that!
Instead, my Mastodon feed and my posts have been feeling a bit like my prior experiences of Twitter. There are some great people out there posting interesting thought provoking or informative things, but so much stuff generally out there falls into a few categories:
* Someone says... tech thing X/Y/Z sucks, chain of people agree.
* Someone says... look, I'm doing this thing!
* Someone says... look, I've got this new thing!
It's easy to get sucked into that. I've been posting less lately, but my posts have been mostly in the latter two categories. "Look, I got some records" etc. They aren't really very interesting or useful things to put out there. I'd like to switch off the frequent thoughts of "ooh I should post this", for a bit. I am weak, so signing out for a while!
I hope I've not gotten involved in the "tech thing X sucks" pattern as much, as that's the one that irks me the most. Oh so much negativity, with a lack of consideration for other people's needs, preferences, and skills. Nothing is black and white... it's all a grey or brown smudge. Can't we be a bit more positive about about what seems good to *us* and celebrate the virtues of it, rather than spend so much effort putting other things down, which others likely have legitimate reasons to prefer? Ooof.
One of the nice things about Mastodon is that you can easily curate your following list carefully, mute and block simply, stick to the home time line, and thereby avoid most of the noise you aren't keen to see. I've decided a bit of a break sounds nicer than a list editing session for now, though. I'll be back at some point no doubt to see what's going on!