inessential: Real Life in Seattle:
And now that we’re all replacing Twitter with other things for our social needs — with Mastodon for some people, Micro.blog for some (including me), Slack, Snapchat, plus falling back to the usual things like blogs and texting and email — we should remember that regular hanging-out-with-folks is massively important.
When I quit social media 4 years ago outside of specialized forums for things like Beer and Motorcycles, I quickly learned the thousands of people who I called ‘friends’ never called me, never wrote me an email, never invited me out for dinner. My emails and texts to them go unanswered, social media was our relationship on their time, the algorithm made my life’s ups and downs ingestible for them because mostly, only the good stuff showed up for them. Dealing with me as I am the good and the bad, the in and outs of life, the successes and failures in a direct way that forced them to acknowledge me and respond was too much. I have 2 people now in my life I regularly interact with that aren’t blood-relatives from the thousands I did prior to January 2014.
I commend Brent on the change. The Twitter chatroom was a difficult one to walk away from. I continued reading it a year after i quit seeing @ replies and ignoring them. Twitter, the micro-blog of it still has value to me. Which is why I have my own – https://adamchandler.me/microblog/content/all/