2020-10-29

after a month long break away from twitter...

I'm back on twitter.

the last month kinda proved that the reason I love twitter is not the service itself, but the people that I follow on it. I intentionally follow a limited number of people, most of which are friends or acquaintances, so it's just so nice to be "casually hanging out" with them on twitter all day every day. cutting twitter off was an incredibly lonely time (especially in a post-covid world), and being on twitter keeps me more sane than seeing people's play-by-play commentary of the presidential debates drove me insane.

spending more time on the fediverse over the last month also led me to realize that a lot of the problems people complain about with regards to twitter are not twitter-specific problems, they are "dealing with other people" problems. drama around who is or isn't being banned doesn't magically vanish just because you switch to a federated and non-commercial social network, and a lot of the issues people have with the content they see on twitter can be resolved with self-discipline: pruning who they follow and not using the official clients which do their best to shove algorithmically surfaced garbage in your face.

there are a lot of good things about the mastodon experience, but it's just a shame that the people I care most about aren't interested in hopping over, so its appeal will forever be limited to me. there are still nice pockets of people on there (much like gemini), so I think I will continue to use it more heavily than I used to prior to this twitter vacation.

if you do choose to take a twitter vacation yourself and you use a third-party client like tweetbot that supports replacing the timeline with a list, I suggest creating a list with no members called "_blank" or something to that effect, and setting that as your default timeline everywhere you regularly interact with twitter. this means that if you do tap or click on your client icon out of habit, you won't be tempted to scroll through what shows up by default. you can also interact with notifications or DMs without engaging with the rest of twitter.

I also replaced the tweetbot icon on my dock with a web clip to the gemini web proxy, so I just ended up reading more of everyone's gemlogs during the break, which wasn't a bad thing at all.