I managed to last a little over a month on my latest Mastodon account, but I just deleted it. You’d think I’d know better than to start by now, but I had forgotten the reasons I quit all the other times and only just remembered again. It started with one simple question: “You’re bored. You’re miserable. You’re sure you’ve wasted time you’ll never get back. Why are you doing this to yourself?” The truth was that I didn’t have a good answer.
My problem with Mastodon is that while I’m not vain enough to think Danko Jones was writing about me, I can’t handle moderation either. I can’t seem to only use platforms like this for an hour on Saturday night. So it’s better for me to not use it at all.
I had other reasons for quitting, but the explanation became a bit of a rant (with tangents). Read at your own risk.
My Experiences with Social Media
My relationship with social media is a bit complicated. I’ve never liked it. I was mostly content with the Web as it existed in 2001. Nevertheless, I adapt. I stay current. I join these social sites hoping they’ll be better than the forums I vaguely remember from my wasted youth.
They never are. What follows generally follows the pattern below.
- Join a site.
- Try to build a new social circle online.
- Try to suss out the prevailing groupthink so I know what opinions to keep to myself1.
- Get annoyed with people posting dumb things.
- Get annoyed with people who set their posting language to English but don’t actually post in English.
- Smack a few trolls around.
- Find neo-Nazis or edgelords playing at neo-Nazism in my feed.
- Get annoyed with “activist” accounts who seemingly do nothing but post online and preach to the choir.
- Try not to get annoyed at independent artists, writers, musicians, etc posting nothing but self-promotion because they’re trying to make an independent, creative living.
- Find myself blocking or muting people for ever pettier reasons.
- Find myself mindlessly scrolling in the vague hope that somebody out there posted something interesting.
- Delete my account.
This was my experience on MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and even Google+. It has been my experience with Mastodon, too. This isn’t the first time I’ve tried to make a place for myself and find something resembling a community in the Fediverse. I just hope that it proves to be the last.
Why I Dislike the Fediverse, Particularly Mastodon
The problem with the Fediverse is that it’s mostly Mastodon. The problem with Mastodon isn’t that it’s not Twitter. The problem is that it tries to not be Twitter and fails miserably. While Mastodon doesn’t provide universal search, quote tweets, or algorithmic curation it is still similar enough to Twitter to confuse people migrating from that platform and encourage a lot of the abusive and self-sabotaging behaviors endemic to that platform. If you’re looking for a fight on the Fediverse, you will find one. If you want to doomscroll, the Federated feed is an inexhaustible firehose of sewage. It is still possible to be up all night staring at people posting inanity and resisting the urge to pick a fight because you think somebody is wrong on the internet.
Why I Should Have Known Better Than To Use Mastodon
Even if something better came along, I’m not sure I would be willing to bother with it. I am getting too old for this online social bullshit. I keep turning to online social interactions because I have no friends beside my wife and no in-person social community. However, online social networks are not a substitute for an in-person social life. They aren’t even a good supplement. It’s nothing but parasocial relationships, and they aren’t even necessarily with extraordinary people.
Worse, every new follower I garnered put additional pressure on me to perform for them, lest they have yet another parasocial relationship with somebody who is only an ordinary human being. I don’t need or want that kind of hassle.
Perhaps Mastodon would be better if I only followed hashtags rather than accounts, and didn’t allow anybody to follow me at all, but I am not willing to attempt that experiment so soon after nuking my account. Even if I did, I would not use my real name or tie my account to my website.
I Really Should Stick to the Open Web
However, if I did that, what would be the difference between that and doing things the old-fashioned way? Do we even need social media? What’s wrong with:
- Having a personal website and email?
- Subscribing to other people’s web feeds?
- Quoting and linking other people’s posts in your own?
- Emailing people to let the know you’ve done the above?
Why the hell can’t we have a social internet or a social web without social media?
Is it because personal websites, email, and RSS aren’t accessible to ordinary people? I’m not convinced that’s the case. I still remember Geocities, you see, and it was full of little websites created by “ordinary people”. They just weren’t lazy — or perhaps that subset of the population that created their own little websites and wasn’t content with AOL had never been ordinary people after all.
I don’t know. I’m just ranting, venting, and nostalgia-tripping for an internet that wasn’t thoroughly gentrified by corporations and people whose brains were thoroughly rotted by television.
Doubling Down
Perhaps that last comment was a bit elitist, but who cares? I might as go balls-to-the-wall and say what I really think. This is my website, isn’t it? What are you assholes gonna do? Cancel me? Lemme give you something to cry about:
If this offends you, don’t worry too much about it. If I manage to remember why I quit the next time I’m tempted to sign up for Mastodon or some similar platform, we won’t see each other anyway. Likewise, if you stay in your little “decentralized” silo you probably won’t see this rant anyway.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of smart, interesting people on the Fediverse. I think it would be better if they had their own websites instead of using yet another social silo that claims to be better because it isn’t owned and operated by a single corporation and thus can’t be purchased outright by some overprivileged space cadet with more money than sense and an ego that make Yngwie Malmsteen resemble a paragon of humility. However, they’ve got to decide that for themselves and act accordingly. When they do, I’ll be here.
Tangents
neo-Nazis and edgelords
I’m not convinced there’s any real difference between actual neo-Nazis and edgelords who just post Nazi imagery for lulz. As far as I’m concerned, the latter are no better than the former because they embolden the former.
Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius. Or, if you prefer modern English: Kill ’em all and let God sort ’em out. Yes, there is a certain ironic hypocrisy in seeking a final solution to Nazism.
online “activists”
I don’t have a lot of use or respect for people whose “activism” consists of posting memes or linking to articles about how the liberal bogeyman du jour is going to ruin everything or preaching about how important it is to “vote blue no matter who”.
I’ve been holding my nose and voting Democratic since I was old enough to vote, for what little good it’s done. I’ve also made a habit of writing to my representatives in Congress or calling them when I think an issue is pressing and I have something constructive to say about it. Hell, if I thought I could get elected and refrain from abusing my power I’d run for office.
But most of the online liberals I’ve seen are no more liberal than an Eisenhower-era Republican, and are only leftist by the standards of the fascists infesting the post-Gingrich Republican Party. They are the people Queensrÿche had in mind when they wrote these lyrics for “Spreading the Disease” in 1988:
Fighting fire with empty words
While the banks get fat and the poor stay poor
And the rich get rich and the cops get paid
To look away as the one percent rules America
I can’t take any of them seriously, and if I muted them all or filtered out their nonsense my feeds would be empty — and I’d have little reason to do Mastodon at that point.
Google+
Google+ was the best of a bad lot. From 2011 to 2013 it truly was a social network for smart people (or reasonable facsimiles thereof). Despite Google’s efforts to turn it into the new Facebook, the platform didn’t truly go to the dogs until Google made everybody on YouTube a Google+ user even though none of them wanted that.
making friends
I know I probably should put more effort into making friends without the internet, but I honestly can’t be bothered. I would rather be “lonely” and free than put in a lot of work to make friends or do the work necessary to be a friend to people who will only disappoint me.
In most of my personal and professional relationships, people rely on me but I can’t depend on them in turn. I see no reason to bother with people who are just going to use me. I already let people use me for most of my waking hours; it’s called having a job.
Yngwie Malmsteen
Metalheads who listen to recordings from the 1980s have probably heard of this guitarist and his ego. However, there was a time when Yngwie Malmsteen was as good as he thought he was. If his 1984 album Rising Force had been wall-to-wall instrumentals like Joe Satriani’s Surfing with the Alien instead of having two songs with Joe Lynn Turner on vocals, it would have been utterly perfect.
Unlike Malmsteen, Elon Musk can’t justify his ego. Not with Tesla, not with SpaceX, and certainly not with Twitter. He’s just an insecure little man taking credit for others’ work. In that, he’s a typical CEO.
I’m not talking about misogyny, transphobia, or white supremacy. More like “abuses of power should be punished by public execution” and “corporations should be stripped of free speech rights so that we can ban advertising”, “mock gamers; win valuable prizes”, or even “conservative Christians aren’t persecuted as often or as harshly as they think they are or deserve to be”. I’m an asshole, not a fucking Nazi.↩︎