since i stopped using twitter, cold turkey
and it's fine. i post here, some decent amount, and occasionally i toot on mastodon
but i still have this... weird tiny nagging feeling sometimes... that i used to have something, and i've lost it, and i don't know how to get it back, but i also don't really know what it was.
i don't know if i have much to say here that i haven't said before haha
i think about having a Twitter Following, and the dawning realization that most of them were there for dunks. but even before that, i feel like a lot of them were tech people who found me through my tech blog because i wrote about something mundane but broad-appeal like "there are chess pieces in unicode ♜".
i used to have a lot of fondness for twitter. surely at one point i had a decent number of... peers? acquaintances? friends maybe? i can think of at least a few people from twitter who i miss. but our actual interactions were replying to each other every few weeks maybe. do they think of me now? i don't know.
did i have a real audience, or a lot of people who liked a thing i did once and were waiting endlessly for a repeat that will never come? what is an "audience"? people who click the like button? prospective customers? what am i even selling? how am i supposed to make this online entrepreneurial thing work, anyway? patreon peaked years ago and it turns out it was mostly the tech people paying me to write tech posts, and i ran out of things to write for them.
i used to feel like my work was valuable and now i have no idea. but i don't know what "valuable" means, either. but that also didn't start eight months ago. i think it started when lexy's labyrinth received... much less interest than i'd thought it might. a reminder that the things i like aren't, in fact, also things that my twitter followers necessarily like. following my whims didn't feel like a safe bet any more.
every so often i glance at tumblr again and i still just do not know what to post. i made so many tweets, though. what were they about? i tweeted tens of thousands of things. personal anecdotes and jokes and stuff. do i post jokes any more? i don't know. did the response to my twitter jokes get worse over time? i wonder.
i still don't know how to be vulnerable again. i don't know how to even take steps in that direction. i look at my tumblr dashboard and i catch glimpses of people who silently cut me off and i just want them to not remember whatever made them do that because there's always the chance they'll start up an all new public fuss. i remember how many callouts started on tumblr, how there are still hate blogs there obsessing over whatever minutiae of our lives they can manage to overhear, how there is effectively no moderation unless it's about a boob. so my impulse is to keep my head down.
but i'm tired of keeping my head down. i somehow resisted the urge on twitter, but mostly by being mad a lot, and i'm tired of that too.
i feel like i keep going around in circles and writing the same post every couple months. i don't know what the path out of this looks like.
i don't feel as dire as this sounds, i think. i'm physically tired today and that's probably coming across. mostly i perceive a void that i don't know what to do with, and whenever i'm reminded of it it's just... annoying