(insta)deactivated

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After much searching through menus and settings (and an unwillingness on the part of the app on the iPad to scroll down far enough to hit the "deactivate" button requiring me to go to a computer), finally hit the deactivate button (six days early, but to hell with it: those who wanted to stay connected have already done so, the rest, bye): my Insta-presence is no more. Aside from that one video with the "get that shit out of my face" vegan frog (which I did watch about 35 times before hitting deactivate: that "motherfucker stop, STOP!" shriek kills me every time), I don't miss any of it.

(And when Threads launched, I realized I didn't really need or want another microblogging conversation platform: that's what this space and the Fediverse are for / Note: still want to use the FV for my comment system here; running out of time before the next annual bill comes due.)

Didn't go full delete on Insta because I'm enough of a shit that I don't want the other Tylers Weaver to have that account name. I've protected it long enough, even added the extra W to myself, across multiple platforms and decades, this being my third (holy shit).

Related/un–: I anticipate the day that some startup buys (or pulls a Muskian coup on SpaceKaren himself) the Twitter name and the rights and the bird and brings it back, sort of like Twinkies and PBR, banking on nostalgia as a (highly viable) business model. As someone rightly said, the brand was the only thing that didn't need fixing at Twitter.

Anyhow byebye massive communication/advertising conglomerate techbro companies. We had our laughs and our cries and our successes and our failures but it's time to move on. Internet dinosaur powers: activate.

threads? threets?

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Signed up for Threads (which, to its credit, is remarkably easy to do), posted a Thread (Threet?) or two and a dog GIF, and realized that a.), Twitter is its own Twitter killer – Space Karen is just the latest (though admittedly far more loathsome – if he and Zuckhead fight it out in the Colosseum, the world would be far better off if the rules of engagement were historically accurate to the place they chose to besmirch, read: lions) wrecking ball; b.), while I’m willing to fiddle about with it, I have little interest in another short, status-based ambient social/swarm experience; and c.), having asked myself, "If I were to start using social media for the first time today and not 15+ years ago, how would I use it?" the answer is, without fail, I wouldn't: while I'm grateful for the eyes that “the socials” have brought to my little narrative experiments and mental gesticulations, I've felt a mental and creative freedom in these last couple of weeks away from all of them – yes, even Mastodon – that I haven't felt in, well, 15+ years. That being said: perhaps with a bit more time (I'm experimenting with once-weekly photo dumps from the week prior on Insta and, like I said, I’m willing to fiddle with Threads for a spell) I’ll find a modicum of enjoyment but I'm not going to expend any significant mental energy to do so.

this is the last thing i’m letting myself write about twitter

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Every tweet is deleted, DMs in the process of, switches turned to off, one by one: every success and failure and hope and disappointment and opportunity and clusterfuck and useless ephemeralilty from 14 years of my life, from 27 through 41.

Were those 14 worth it? Not really, no.

While I've made some wonderful connections with now-lifelong friends and creative collaborators and had a few good opportunities, it wasn't worth what I let it do with my brain: I got sucked into its promise - which was very real - when I was at my most vulnerable, having lost my job, then my house – and I bought into the fantasy that it could give me a road forward.

The only road it gave me was a roundabout back into the feeding trough, dangling the hope that maybe I could be mentioned in the same breath as those writers with the 200k followers (a need for validation for which I’ve nothing but shame), that maybe I could have some impact on the world, that my hopes and creations were more than poker chips for a rigged game.

In the slot machine of Twitter, at least, they weren’t.

Anyhow, I'm not letting myself repeat those mistakes in this new social era (if I make the same mistakes at 41 as I did at 27, I won't be angry, just disappointed): I've happily moved on to Mastodon and here and the newsletter, doing whatever I feel like doing creatively and sharing it with whoever finds their way to it because at this point, honestly, fuck it.

“Fuck it”: was a more apposite summation of Twitter ever written? Probably. But fuck it: I'm free. And so are you.

links_2022w48

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A new Saturday thing: a compendium of links I've posted to Mastodon throughout the week as a way to wrap up. If I could figure out a way to automate the Mastodon -> Obsidian doc workflow, that'd be grand, but this was pretty simple. Anyways.

(that other place) notes, expanded

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Expanding, from Mastodon post:

As someone who attempted to run the day to day of a company financed by a rich asshole who thought they knew everything by virtue of being a rich asshole – though this particular rich asshole was much more hands off than Twitter's resident rich asshole (except when he had an idea that just had to happen which required me to spend most of my tenure fighting back and getting him to open the wallet to basic site functionality that needed fixing and enhancement – I mean, who would have thought that a digital archive of more than a million pages of scanned historical documents should have a robust and user-friendly search engine?) – I have nothing but sympathy for those trying to keep it afloat: You're staying with a sinking ship whose iceberg decided they should be the captain.

At this rate, I'll be stunned if Twitter's still up and running by the end of the week.