💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~winter › gemlog › 2024 › 3-26.gmi captured on 2024-08-18 at 17:55:27. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-26)
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A couple of weeks ago on cohost, I came across this post by @MOKKA, and it's kind of been tumbling through the back of my head ever since. It's based around the two general feedback mechanisms you find in social media - share and like - and the frustration @MOKKA feels when people like a post when it's clearly meant to be shared.
I'm active on social media, but try to avoid any thoughts of these features. First, they're a dopamine hit, and eventually, you're writing in a very particular way - designed to be shareable, to be uncontroversial (or, worse, the opposite). Once you're down the rabbit hole of expecting a certain number of likes, or shares, you've already begun poisoning your mind and rewiring how you engage with other people online. And yet I'm aware that if you're in your mid 30s or younger, you have been conditioned for probably your entire online life to think this way. Facebook is now twenty years old.
Similarly: one of my mutuals on Bluesky (& formerly Twitter) posted that the reason she can't get behind Mastodon is that someone could take her username and profile picture on mastodon.binkbonk (or whatever) and start impersonating her.
Well, yeah. That's entirely the point. You can be who you want, and you're not beholden to an all-powerful admin.
Honestly.
The last twenty years or so we've been conditioned to think in terms of single, focused identities, to think of engagement before all else. The reason for this is obvious: to keep us using particular products, as ourselves, under our own names, and for corporations to build up a massive understanding of each individual real-name'd person to sell focused ads or just sell the data generally.
We think in terms of how we use the platforms but the platforms think in terms of how they use us.
This is just a gemlog out here in nothingspace to say that there's a better way. You can do what I did, and pick an alias without even checking to see if there are others using it (there are, at least, two other Winter/winters in geminispace). You can stop worrying about whether your post will do numbers, or how to grow your personal brand, and all the other ideas that have been forced on to us by people who will never have our best interests at heart.
You can just write in the quiet, accepting that what comes, comes, and enjoy the strange freedom that comes from the expectation that nobody is reading.
Going back a few weeks: in the end, I did the only reasonable thing with @MOKKA's post. I thought about leaving a comment, but didn't. I thought about sharing it, because that was how I saw it, but didn't. No, in silent protest, I scrolled to the end of the post, skipped past the share button, and hit like.