Staring down the barrel of 2020 is unpleasant. Four years ago, Twitter became completely unworkable for me, to the point where I basically killed my primary twitter account off after having locked myself out of it deliberately for a couple of months. I see no reason to think that Twitter will be any more tolerable in the coming year – not only because Twitter is and has been asleep at the switch in the modern world of online ratfucking, but because it\u2019s almost impossible to stop the toxicity leaking into your timeline through retweets and dry-snitching by the algorithm. Jack Dorsey needs to stay in whatever African village he\u2019s white-hoping his way to and the board needs to shut down Twitter and give the money back to the shareholders.<\/p>\n
Instagram became the only social media I can tolerate. Being over 40, it\u2019s less FOMO and more trying to keep in touch with friends. But it\u2019s still owned by Facebook, which is completely<\/em> untrustworthy and even less willing to face up to its responsibilities in a new world. And while it\u2019s not a problem keeping the politics at arm\u2019s length on Insta, it\u2019s also not comprehensive at keeping up with the people I\u2019d like to be in touch with. And I don\u2019t want to feed Facebook any more than I have to, despite the fact that I\u2019ve almost certainly managed to keep Instagram completely separated from anything I\u2019ve ever had on FB.<\/p>\n But what are the alternatives? I have several. On the photography front there\u2019s Flickr, which predates social media as we know it, and VSCO, which is less of a social thing. There\u2019s also Cluster, which is a sort of private Instagram-alike – if you can convince people to join it. There\u2019s Slack, and the good ol\u2019 group chat, either of which is preferable – but neither of which is comprehensive.<\/p>\n And then there\u2019s Twitter. There are alternatives – micro.blog and Mastodon being the two most prominent – but both are intensely geeky, not that easy to get going, and don\u2019t let you view and reply to Twitter users even if your content can be piped out to them. There\u2019s Tumblr, which is out from under Yahoo or Verizon and is now an adjunct of WordPress that has some social media features and splits the difference between Twitter and blogging. And at some level, there\u2019s still RSS, and it\u2019s possible to get anything that approximates a blog into an RSS feed. \u00a0I have other people\u2019s Twitter, Flickr, micro.blog and theoretically even Tumblr all going through RSS.<\/p>\n But RSS isn\u2019t social media. Replies, including favorites, aren\u2019t really a thing in RSS. If you want to be in touch with people conversationally, RSS isn\u2019t going to get you there. And thus we come to the real problem: two-way communication is siloed within every app. Text messaging and email are cross-platform, but everything else is its own service. And you have to coax people into Tumblr, or micro.blog, or Slack, or whatever. (Or convince them to log into the Flickr account that everyone created in 2005 and forgot about by 2008.) You might be able to see things from other people, but if you want to react, you have to give in and log in.<\/p>\n I went through this before. After 2006, I basically knocked my LiveJournal on the head and resolved to get out in the real world. I ended up posting less than once a week on LJ in 2007, and by 2008 it wasn\u2019t even a thing anymore. I was never able to coax enough people into Vox before its demise, and by that point Twitter and Facebook had taken over social media. And now, I\u2019m faced with the same problem all over again, only twelve years older. The easiest way to make friends at 48 is to reconnect with the friends you already have. And when they\u2019re scattered across the country – or the world – then if you aren\u2019t in contact, the only real way to get back in touch is to open the sewer hole and log into Facebook.<\/p>\n Social media is a slot machine. You keep feeding it your time, your interest and exposing yourself to an ongoing corrosion of your soul, in hopes that when you pull the refresh lever this time you\u2019ll get that serotonin hit from someone you actually care about. It\u2019s fine at a casual level, I suppose, but it\u2019s a pretty piss-poor substitute for actual belonging. Nevertheless, I have to find some way in 2020 of making it work for me without getting worked over by it. Maybe if things go well, there will be some regulation and control over these systems before long. And if they don\u2019t\u2026of which more later.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Staring down the barrel of 2020 is unpleasant. Four years ago, Twitter became completely unworkable for me, to the point where I basically killed my primary twitter account off after having locked myself out of it deliberately for a couple of months. I see no reason to think that Twitter will be any more tolerable … <\/p>\n