This crafty little ego keeps trying to work its way into my life. Today I am taking my son to Arsenal to watch a game, it’s his first time, so naturally he’ll want to take in the sites and take some photos. Unfortunately, my primary response is downloading Instagram ready to record some stories.
Photos and videos as memories are one thing, but my ego wants to show off on Instagram.
There are loads of services and apps in my life that I pay for. Perhaps too many, but if I value a service and use it a lot, I like to pay the developers something for their trouble. It feels unethical to use something and not contribute if you can, so I spend too much money on services. However, there’s something that flips in my brain once I start paying for something and I become much less tolerable to bugs.
I’ve had enough of reading and listening about Twitter as the next person. So much so I’ve muted the words on Mastodon, and it has removed almost all trace of it. However, I get it. I still can’t help myself reading every new post that crosses my attention, and I know why we all feel the need to talk about what is going on over at the bird site — because it hurts us all.
Matt Tait in Pwnallthethings hitting the nail on the head more than once, but the real sticking take away was this:
Some people will love Trump’s tweets. Others will hate them. But Elon doesn’t really care so long as you pay to talk about it and watch ads as you do.
I’ve heard take after take after take on Twitter and what’s happening, but this sums it up perfectly.
Since moving all of my proverbial social media eggs into one basket, it has become obvious that a noisy feed sucks. Don’t get me wrong, there are some gigantic benefits from following everyone from one app, and not doing my usual bounce around several apps to elevate boredom. Unfortunately, I doubt that the best pace for this is micro.blog because it’s making my experience worse.
Like many users on the service, I use micro.
YesterdayI posted that I had jumped in with the new pricing strategy for Matter and become a Patron subscriber. Strangely, I thought that most people had heard of this amazing ‘Read it later’ app as it was the new hotness for a while. Following some questions on why I choose to use it and comparisons to other services, I thought I’d cover a the main thing I like about it.
For a long time, I have never thought about the topics that I write about. Granted, I still think I am some kind of tech reporter, but I have no desired to actually write about the topics needed to become one (plus I suck). I much prefer to publish things that come to mind and let others decide whether they want to read dit or not. Only when Jarrod kindly encouraged people to read my blog because I wrote about writing did I think about how meta my blog is.
I’m pretty certain, if it doesn’t exist already, that in the near future you will be able to predict my mental state from my blog posts. They show where my thoughts are currently and often what is going on in my life. I enjoy posting, but there is something exposing about hitting publish and your words being there for all to see, but it is one of the best things you can do.
Since Twitter imploded, I am ecstatic that a lot of the wonderful people I have met online have followed me out. It gives me even less reason to think about going back, but I’ve seen some bubbling thoughts about returning. What social network you choose to use shouldn’t be this hard, but I do know why there are these lingering doubts, and it’s mainly to do with FOMO.
The Fear Of Missing Out is a powerful motivator.
There are a few unsolvable questions in my life. What iPhone will I actually use? Which read it later service is the best one? Will I ever stop changing notes apps and actually write some notes? Perhaps the biggest ones revolve around social media. I haven’t been happy with my usage of it for years, but still as yet can’t find a solution.
This is frankly a ridiculous issue to have, but my feeling on Social Media boil down to my relationship with Twitter.