Twitter vs the fediverse
Twitter is now a lost cause, but does Mastodon have a hope of taking off?
My hate-hate relationship with the cesspit of moral and political depravity known as Twitter recently reached yet another crunch point, and I’ve stopped posting anything there save for links to stuff published on this Substack blog. With evil Tony Stark Elon Musk now in charge of the twitters, and the prospect of it degenerating further into a vehicle for its master’s ego, I felt forced to say no more.
Since making that decision I have established a presence in the fediverse as mas.to/hesgen. However, despite having hopes for the underlying ActivityPub software technology, I have little faith that Mastodon and similar will scale into something that can fill the void left by Twitter. ActivityPub is ideally suited to small communities of professional and social interests.
Personally, I find social media of all kinds to be a black hole for time and killer of longer-form journalistic creativity. I’d rather spend considerably less time posting to microblogs, and, ideally, no time at all reading them for other than journalistic sources. That may seem selfish of me, but life is too short to be arsing around online for little or no net gain. There are books to be read!
Twitter has brought out the worst in people, and I am no exception. ‘I shitpost therefore I am’ is a crappy raison d’être, and, despite the wonderful folk I’ve met online, I would rather be interacting more with people in the real world.
The immediate problem for me is promoting myself as a professional writer, which is something I’ve done via Twitter since it superseded RSS feeds such as the Google Reader of old. If you are in a similar position to me, I’d be interested to hear of your experiences. Contact me via hesgen.com.