apropos of nothing, maybe it's stress from job hunting and other life logistics, but i've found myself struggling to enjoy social media as much as i used to—then again, it's not the first time i've ended up retreating
at one point in my life, social media was an escape from real life. now, well, it feels like real life is an escape from social media.
i used to be heavily on irc and now i'm on maybe two or three channels and most of my activity is going "pub?". even my hardcore irc friends spend most of their time on slacks and discords now. livejournal was similar. at one point it had all my friends, and then somehow almost everyone ended up elsewhere.
facebook died for me years ago, the advert shuffle timeline just surfaces the same things over and over, and buries the friends who aren't optimizing for engagement: "here's eight posts you've already seen, oh, one of your friends went through hell eight months ago".
a friend kept saying "you do photos now, try instagram" and instagram is the literal worst platform for sharing photography. everything gets crushed down in size, standard photo sizes get cropped, and since it went shuffle timeline, the entire thing is just full of tiktoks and screencaps.
it's probably not worth mentioning orkut except as a punchline, but there's been plenty of "hey i'll give this a try" and subsequently abandoned it, like group chats.
i've tried group chats but frankly i don't have "the lads" or a group of friends all with close ties to one another, and when i've tried being more sociable it's been a recipe for an autistic meltdown. i've come to terms with being friends with other weirdos and loners, and catching up 1:1 whenever the adhd permits it.
which up until now, left twitter, which is going through death rattles.
twitter felt optimized for adhd, here's short tweets, people riffing off each other, and now twitter feels the exact opposite. here's a teenager with a bad opinion. here's a right wing talk show host who is reading from a script. twitter just feels more and more like a collective hatewatch of the world around us.
sure, there's mastodon.
mastodon isn't the same, and that's ok, but it is kinda tiring that the earliest adopters are the ideological fediverse zealots, the gnu+linux reply guys, and the people with the wrong sort of carbon monoxide poisoning, with zero funny posts between them. it really doesn't help that one of the bigger geek instances is for "nerds who want a seed round". i really miss the fun weirdos.
cohost is fun, most of the time. except for when my timeline is someone forgetting they can edit posts, and keeps resharing themselves, or when there's one viral post and every single page is the same thing. maybe things will improve when "disable reshares" becomes an option, but for now it feels like a quiet bar that's cozy up until open mic night starts or a hennight appears.
honestly, i was already feeling burned out before I started sharing my photography pictures, but that's tailed off massively this year as I've spent a lot more time travelling. i also knew it was a temporary thing, because long term I wouldn't be able to stay in london and hang out with crows.
anyway ramble over back to the regular eggbug
