My Twitter experience was kinda bad for me! It was good for a long time, but it was also bad. I’m not talking about the takeover by Captain 420, or people tweeting mean things at me. I mean the constantly feeling like a exposed nerve. The “let me show you this awesome new thing to be mad about!”

I love, for instance, that Mastodon doesn’t have the equivalent of a QT. There are plenty other platforms to do the “Hey, look at this asshole here” thing. The, “Does this smell bad to you?” thing. /2

I get that people might miss Twitter’s influence. But that obviously had costs too. One of those was convincing so many people that they were every day engaged in a giant tug of war over The Discourse, and that every tweet of theirs—and everyone in their feed—should be aimed at moving that rope three millimeters in the correct direction.

I don’t deny social media’s power to make change. But I’m one culture critic spouting opinions. I am not organizing the friggin Arab Spring over here. /4

Anyway, I don’t know if I’m going to use this site much. I’m trying to unplug more generally. (Also: I’m still on Twitter, just using it less.) Maybe this is just methadone for Twitter. Methadon.

But I would love this to be a smaller, more positive, less brain-poisoning experience. And that may not be possible! Maybe many of the problems I had with Twitter were in fact Me Problems, and I packed them in my luggage with me. Let’s find out! /end