Don't Talk About It...
Hiding
I'm way less social than I use to be. At least online I am. I'm a complete introvert so I've never been a social person in real life. But my God throw a social network at me and watch out. I mean I was you Yahoo! 360, Plurk, Friendfeed. I tried just about anything (Google Buzz). But times are changing. Call it my advanced age or the fact that online just is not the utopia we grey hairs once thought it was. I just don't feel like telling high single digit numbers of people why I didn't tie my shoes today.
That is not to say I don't want to share at all. I just think my thinking about what I share and with who has evolved. I have friends I like to share random thoughts with to bounce things off of. I have close friends I want to share experiences and media with. But I do not like the idea anymore of sharing everything on a platform that I have not control of and can disappear at any time. That is part of my recent love of Mastodon and other federated services. I think by the end of the year I'm going to spin up an instance of Mastodon and maybe PixelFed to run my online social presence. Under my own domain and everything. I'll try to get a few people to buy in so I'm not just speaking to myself. Even though the little bit of research I've done on mastodon administration is intimidating. I really want to give it a try.
But Why???
Well for one, I am not famous. I've accepted it. I've come to terms with it. I think I am able to crank out a funny zinger every six to eight months that might get twelve or more people to view and actually repost. But any ideas I had that I could be a trend setter or online philosopher are long over. So I don't really need a platform like Facebook or Twitter to push my thoughts when I can find three to eight people on a federated service that is dedicated to interests like mine to give me meaningful input on how profound or ass backwards my posts are.
Secondly I love family but I do not need to see what they are doing all the time. I mean send me a like to a photo archive during the holidays or when Tasha makes honor roll. But I don't need SMS notifications of their daily timeline. I mean I love Google Photos for just that reason. I load up pics of the boys, sort them into an album and push them to the couple people who are interested. No need to flood a social network with 65 pics of my kids looking happy and me looking fat and balding that only and few people are even going to look at.
Last reason is sadly and I've eluded to in the first two, I'm not that interesting. So I'm not looking for the post that is going to make me viral. I'm just looking to say some stupid stuff at times. So I'll keep my Twitter account because more news is on there than anything. But in 2019 I'm going open and federated.
Now if only group chat was just a federated.
...To Be Continued