I was recently asked about joining Cohost, which is one of those alternative social media sites like Mastodon that’s not run by some megacorp and/or owned by some trillionaire. Also Mastodon isn’t just one site and is a better example of decentralization than all the blockchain crap and so on but that’s not my current thread. My point here is that I wanted to get away from social media in general for the time being, regardless of who’s running it or what algorithms or lack thereof are handling what shows up.
While I’m not completely avoiding the whole social media thing, since I occasionally look at Twitter or Tumblr posts at no regular interval if it comes up for whatever reason, and that’s becoming more difficult by the day as they’re more strongly insisting that you log in to see anything so they can track your porn habits or whatever, I just don’t want to get involved with it at the moment. Though the question is what counts as social media given the number of ways people can interact with each other online, so I’ve just generally defined it as any site that focuses on a “wall” or “timeline”, regardless of how much it actually is chronological versus algorithmic unrelated nonsense, mainly populated by posts from or shared by accounts one follows. So things like Twitter, Tumblr, and Facebook count, but Discord is more of a chatroom unless someone makes a server that acts like one of those for a weird experiment. Supplementary timelines added onto a gaming service also don’t count as they can generally be ignored and aren’t the main focus.
This isn’t out of concern that an alternative social media site would eventually be absorbed into a megacorp and ruined beyond recognition, either. In fact, Mastodon, which is really more of a server software by the looks of things, specifically takes steps against that through its decentralization, where each server generally functions similarly but will have its own rules and can optionally communicate with or block each other, but somehow accounts can be shared or moved between them, or something like that, however it works. I’ve only vaguely looked at it. Meanwhile we’ll just have to see where Cohost goes as it looks like more of a Tumblr alternative with more ability to put whatever in posts.
The main thing is that I just don’t feel up to messing with social media sites, or the majority of art gallery sites either like DeviantArt and whatnot. Yet I still get onto things like Discord and VRChat, the latter even despite the EAC update, which mainly has just made it take longer to load as far as my experience, maybe causing a blue screen once so far, and I’m pretty sure people have already worked around it, given it’s EAC after all. Those are really just meme-infested chatrooms when defined in the most bare and general way. The question is what would come after Discord, upon some scenario where it would be a bad idea to keep using it, if we’d just start setting up random IRC servers again or something else.
As far as my generally inactive Twitter account, which to my knowledge is still just copying whatever shows up in this site’s RSS feed, I’m probably still just not going to touch it, unless it somehow becomes a threat to my wallet because of some weird plan to make posting anything cost money like a bunch of people have theorized, purely because rich jerks are jerks who are rich. I wouldn’t put that idea past them, but at the moment I’ll just not do anything involving Twitter and do fun things instead.
But of course there’s also my site, which has been my alternative to social media, while companies seem to be having their social media accounts as an alternative to a website proper. However I’m a bit backlogged on updating my site and have gradually been getting around to it a piece at a time when I have a moment. Not just these text posts or reviews either.