Mastodon

Blogging Like It’s 2010

Posted by Matt Birchler
— 1 min read

2 weeks ago today I decided that I wasn’t having fun on Twitter anymore, so I took a break, and outside of posting a couple movie and book reviews, I literally have not gone on to see what’s happening (if you’ve @‘d or DMd me, I’m sorry).

But it turns out I still have a lot of stuff to say, so I’ve been posting here a ton, and I kinda love it!

There are the benefits of posting to a site I own, of course, but I like the different mindset I get into when posting a thought here rather than on social media. There’s a certain tone to social media posting that you seem to inevitably fall into, and that tone is “I’m going to be as snarky as possible all the time.” Especially on services like Twitter or Mastodon that have hard limits on how long your posts can be, the game quickly becomes, “how much snark and proof that I’m so smart into X characters?”

It’s all a trade-off, of course, as I think that letting more people talk to each other is good and that things like the 280 character limit incentivize creativity. You shouldn’t need to learn how to spin up a server and self-host a website to be allowed to post online, and I think centralized services like Twitter have enabled more people to get online and have their voices heard.

I guess what I’m saying is that I love the democratization of the internet, and I love that social media sites have enabled more people to be heard, but I also think that the sort of discourse this type of communication encourages isn’t ideal. It’s also addictive, so I end up spending more time there than I’d like. Which is why I’m here, blogging about tech, music, politics, and whatever else comes to mind. If you want to respond to anything, I won’t see your message on Twitter for a while, but you can use the “get in touch” link over in the menu.