I've been using social media since long before the term "social media" was coined (e.g. Usenet, the earliest ARPANET mailing lists, etc.) I've avoided Facebook all along, used #Twitter quite a bit in its heyday (and maintain an account there that I keep locked now), and I used Google Plus quite heavily. I have accounts on Post (which is about to go dark, apparently), Bluesky (rarely look at it), Threads (hardly ever visit), etc.

Of course the scale of these can be vastly different. An ARPANET mailing list on the subject of wine tasting with a few hundred members was enough to trigger a Pentagon colonel coming out to sites to remind us all about appropriate usage of a Defense Department funded network.

That didn't change anything of course, and eventually DOD realized that such lists were pushing the evolution of email tools rapidly in very useful ways.

Did you know that the very first ARPANET mailing list Digest was for SF-LOVERS (science fiction discussion, obviously) and was created quickly as a "temporary" expedient because the direct (immediate) distribution list had gotten "too large" (probably still just hundreds) for available resources? The digest format created for that situation has remained largely unchanged since then and is still widely used on the Internet today.

I mention all this because in some ways #Mastodon is a throwback to those very early days (with Usenet being perhaps the closest parallel, given the Mastodon topological model). And Mastodon still manages to be quite "low pressure" in significant ways, even as your follower count goes up (which is the exact opposite of the situation on Twitter, even before Musk took over).

That is, when I check here in the morning, I don't usually feel the need to steel myself for a deluge of potential nastiness.

And that's a good thing, especially these days.

That's all. -L