I, like a lot of people, have some misgivings about Elon Musk taking over Twitter. To be fair, I haven’t personally experienced much unpleasantness or inconvenience as a result of his changes to the service. The worst it’s done for me is bring back bad memories what happens when my fellow nerds and I start thinking we can fix everything in the world.
To be honest, I’d mostly stopped using Twitter even before the Muskopalypse. And contrary to most experiences I’d heard of, I wasn’t warn down by toxic disagreement from political enemies. Rather, I was getting stressed by people with similar politics pointing out every injustice and outrage. I can understand the motivation: people feel an obligation on social media to amplify the signal of things that are important to them. But it was stressing me out, so I started to drift away.
By the way, I haven’t seen many people bring this up, but Elon Musk is still the reigning Time Person of the Year. At the time of announcement, that title struck me as at least five years late: He used to be the only guy trying to make electric cars and private space programs a reality, but by last year, both had become cliché. And Musk himself had devolved from intriguing intellectual, to, well, a nerd who thinks he can fix everything in the world.
So I followed many people over to Mastodon, the open source alternative to Twitter. So far it’s been okay, and in terms of the basic usage, not that different. But like a lot of open source software, it does seem more complex than it has to be.
If you’re not familiar with it, the idea of Mastodon is that it’s not one entity that stores all the posts and information about all the users. Instead, it’s a bunch of servers that operate independently, but can still interact with one another. And anyone can set up their own server (at their own expense) and set up their own rules.
(Fun fact: Donald Trump’s social network, Truth Social is just a modified version of Mastodon.)
So Mastodon is a bit of a throwback to harder-to-use, do-it-yourself Internet from before social media. That throwback feeling was underlined recently when famed blogger/tweeter/author John Scalzi promoted the idea that we go back to blogs as a sort of pseudo social network. I thought that sounded appealing, and I’d thought of reviving this blog recently, so I took the plunge and dusted off my old blog. Maybe it will lead to a new age of intriguing long-form commentary, and intelligent discourse and interaction. But I notice that the new Blogger interface makes it easier to add emojis than links and that does not fill me with confidence.
