So... where to now?

Warning, this is long and rambling, the important info is at the end

About two months ago, the day Space Karen started rate limiting browsing on the platform formerly known as Twitter (I outright refuse to call it X) I decided I'd run a little experiment on myself. Whilst I didn't do anything especially drastic, unlike Reddit (I should write about that), I decided there and then that until the rate limits were reversed, I wouldn't give the site any of my attention. In fact, the nuclear option I took on Reddit possibly prompted this experiment as I was reminded what I enjoyed so much about the open internet. To my surprise, the results have been quite interesting, or at least I thought them interesting enough to write about, and also provide an explanation to the friends on there as to what's going on with me.

I think it's safe to say that up until the start of this experiment I had a bit of a Twitter addition, I'd be checking it several times a day, often scrolling for some time trying to keep up on everything that was going on. Many of my friends arewere on there (I have no idea how true this comment is being away from it for some time now), and it's been a privilege to get to know some fantastic friends after meeting on there.

This too shall pass

As with all platforms, I was aware from the day I created my account that my time on there was limited, I just never knew when that time would come. There's a reason This Too Shall Pass is Rule #3 Much like Tumblr before it, the decision to wind down my involvement was not entirely voluntary. I've taken prolonged breaks from Twitter and other social media in the past, especially those that are predominantly kinky for me, but what makes this one different, unlike those previous occasions that were total social media blackouts for my mental health, I decided to simply move my attention elsewhere.

This however, was different, I wasn't stepping back to distance myself, the enshitifcation had finally become too much.

Now I'm by no means not the only one to have finally had enough of that wild west platform. It's no secret that hate on that platform has multiplied several fold in recent times, but that wasn't actually the driving force. The way rate limits were implemented was actually the sole catalyst for making me even consider jumping. Put simply, I would not have access to my friends held ransom by some man child who I suspect would happily see me gone anyway. I just made the decision on Twitter's behalf.

Insightful reflection

As it's done before, this period of reduced social interaction has made me re-evaluate my priorities. I'm kinda proud of myself for never being one to give a single fuck about follower counts/interactions, and I occasionally went out of my way to avoid interaction on the platform whenever possible. That isn't to say I didn't enjoy the interactions I had on there, I struggle to recall a single one that wasn't eventually positive. Even when I've disagreed with people, I've almost always felt like we've both come out of the discussions, often heated, having learnt something.

Yet after spending some time away and in other places, I've realised that I was still getting sucked into the vacuous crap that seems to permit most large social media platforms. Now one of the common criticisms I see of the Fediverse is the lack of engagement on there, a sentiment I've shared on more than one occasion. But recently I've come to realise something, there's less engagement because the engagement just isn't necessary.

Big social networks heavily push engagement™️ through the algorithm™️ because keeping people engaged on the platform is good for showing them adverts and thus good for their bottom line. At first, I found the lack of responses on Mastodon, for example, somewhat jarring. I'd be used to a blog post generating comments and discourse, yet that often doesn't happen. The comments they do get though are often far more insightful, and because there's no possibility of ulterior motives, a like is just that, somebody showing their casual appreciation of something.

But what about XYZ???

Since I first started drafting this post there's been a lot of talk about BlueSky and Threads. I have my opinions here, but I want to preface them by saying all I know is from a few Lemmy comments on the matter, and I learnt enough from those to know I wouldn't benefit from doing further research, so I'll keep it brief.

BlueSky is Twitter 1.0 will all the problems that came with it as a slowly developing platform. It has investors, shareholders, policies and interests, interests which conflict with being open permissible. Ultimately, there is nothing currently stopping somebody else buying BlueSky and thus the wheel turns again.

Threads is a more interesting, and threatening option. To cut what's already meant to be short even shorter, Meta has created another microblogging system and is talking about opening to the Fediverse. I won't go into why this is a terrible, terrible idea for the Fediverse as a whole, but I will link to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Essentially, it boils down to this: do not trust Meta, they have proven themselves time and time again to never have your best interests at heart.

For the benefit of those at the back again:

NEVER TRUST META

I don't see any of the platforms so far as anything but a distraction to stop people leaving large monolithic platforms, so put simply will be giving them a wide birth. To be perfectly blunt, I can't be arsed doing everything all over again only for the ensihtification to repeat.

Out with the new, in with the old

I've made no secret out of the fact that I love decentralisation, I wrote a long piece a few years ago after the demise of XTube detailing how I think it could be a fantastic solution to for the Kink Community as a whole. I still have the domain to do something with that, and the tech I want to use to power it is coming along every day, I just need to actually write a few frontends for it. I also have the absolute upmost respect for the various kinky Mastodon admins out there, especially kinky.business (the instance I'm on) and gearheads.social (for the way Ducky and Astra promote federation/relaying as a whole).

Whilst it's not specifically kink oriented, I also have huge respect for Lemmy admins, with my personal choice being sh.itjust.works. These are all services I'm fully capable of running myself, but I've made the conscious choice not to for now, and for me the ability to make that choice is the single biggest strength of the Fediverse.

Yet with all this talk of ActivityPub and federated servers, it's often easy to overlook one of the oldest, most reliable, and in my opinion, most versatile protocols out there. It's a format that has stood the test of time with only minimal changes, and has even survived the biggest implementation ending up on the Google graveyard.

I am, of course, talking about RSS (and its offspring).

It's taken me a while to rediscover just how good RSS could be, in fact I'm still learning. The content I want, and only that content, in a reader of my choice to browse at my leisure, without having to visit dozens of sites looking for updates. And all this with perfect accessibility and rendering exactly as I like, with dark mode support out of the box for most apps, but best of all, without invasive ads everywhere. Now to say RSS is perfect would be an oversimplification, however, with the likes of Atom alongside the original format, it is very powerful indeed. The great thing is, RSS support is everywhere still, even if it isn't as obvious as it once was.

In fact, I fell so in love with RSS/Atom that a few weeks back I decided to rewrite this site in a new engine that had better support for it (there's yet another post I should write as a technical deep dive). I can now offer RSS feeds for the whole site, all public posts, just the hidden ones, and even one for every tag, all in RSS, Atom, and JSON format. And to maximise accessibility, all of these are linked in the <head> of every page for auto-detection by RSS clients.

Towards the future

After a few months off and away from the worst of things, I have occasionally stuck my head back into the monolithic world. Whilst there is still some very good ~~CoNtEnT~~ on there, everytime I look a little bit more of me dies, so I've decided that I'll be staying off large platforms wherever possible. This mostly means it's going to be self-hosting and federation going forward.

So, where to now?

I'd like to think I'm everywhere and nowhere all at the same time, much like my name implies. If you do for some reason want to follow what I'm up to/get in touch, then checkout my kink links

And should this be the end of a journey with any of you, wherever you are, I hope we will one day meet again somewhere, and should we not, I truly wish you all the best.