Rach Smith
Rach Smith'sdigitalgarden

Tired of timelines

Added: November 15, 2022

I joined Mastodon. It feels very much like Twitter did in 2009. Some people are probably jazzed about that but to me, it just felt… exhausting. I couldn’t put my finger on why until I read Luke Harris’s post The Fail Whale Cascade

 I’m bored of what I call “the timeline era”. Scanning an unending stream of disconnected posts for topics of interest is no longer fun.

This is it, for me. At this stage in my life, I simply do not have the time or energy to shake my little pan in a stream of information, trying to sift out the nuggets I want to engage with.

I subscribe to the RSS feeds of personal websites (if you have one, email it to me or comment on this post!). That is more than enough content to consume each day. The thing I feel is missing from Twitter is the ease of interaction - it is so easy to mention whoever you like, strike up a conversation and make internet friends. It’s the reason I came back to Twitter after quitting for 2 years. I wanted to hang out and talk shop again.

Maybe it is just a case that if I want that interaction, I have to make more of an effort to get it: comment on people’s blogs, send emails to authors who don’t have comment forms and encourage people to do the same here. Perhaps I could get a username with my real name on Reddit and actually post in subreddits instead of just lurking.

Thanks for reading! If you'd like to share your thoughts you can leave a comment, send me an email, hit me up on Mastodon, or add an issue on GitHub.

Comments

  • Mykal Machon

    November 15, 2022 at 12:52 AM

    Great post; I agree with a lot of the sentiment here.

    Mastodon

    When I first got on Mastodon I instantly followed 20-30 hashtags that interested me and every webdev/gamedev I could find (200+). That ended up being the wrong choice.

    Since then I've pulled back to 5-6 hashtags, and 20-30 people that I follow. It's made things more meaningful, but can still feel like I'm "shaking my little plan in a stream of information" at times. I'm not sure if I'll stick around but it's mostly been a fun experiment.

    RSS and Blogging

    I've been getting into RSS over the last year and love that I get to choose what content I consume, but miss the ease of interaction in general (Your blog has been one of my favourites since I found it a few months back actually.🙂). Maybe something new will come along and bridge the gap? I've looked into webmentions but they seem way too technically complicated to get mass adoption.

    I'm relatively new to the whole blogging thing and have been treating it a bit like my own knowledge base; no real direction. Topics include coffee, cooking, coding, technobabble, video games, and a whole bunch of other things I'm interested in. Here's the RSS feed if you're interested: https://mykal.codes/rss.xml

    Thanks for the post!

    • Rach Smith OP

      November 15, 2022 at 4:15 AM

      Hi Mykal, thanks for sharing your feed with me, I've added it to my list. Your post on taking screenshots of your work is a reminder I needed. I'm bad at doing this and then I get sad when I think about how I don't have a visual record of anything I've done! Especially from my agency days.

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