I have a love/hate relationship with Mastodon. On one hand, I love that’s it’s open and free and there are no ads inherently. I love that it’s easy to find groups of people with similar likes and hobbies through hashtags. I love that it’s boring–truly, a website that isn’t trying to be flashy and branded and desperate for your money is awesome.
What I hate about Mastodon isn’t really Masto related, it’s just a realization that it’s hard to meet people you truly like and want to hang out with. Social media isn’t set up like real life; in real life, you might go to a function, meet some new people, and decide that one or two of those people are cool enough to hang out with again in the future. On the internet, you shout into a void and a variety of voices respond back, and there really is no choice. You follow people, sure, but then it’s like you’re in their living room 24/7; you hear everything they have to say. You can stop that, by muting words, or by muting their profile, even–but then what’s the point of following them in the first place?
And this isn’t even scratching the surface of malicious actors within the social media world. The “reply guys,” the spambots, the people who can’t take a joke. You might meet these people at a party, but you don’t have to talk to them. You can go somewhere else. Online, they’re everywhere and you’ll be spending much of your time blocking and reporting people and accounts. In real life, you can just leave the party!
When I was a teenager, we had AOL chat rooms, we had forums, and we had messaging programs like AIM and ICQ. I’m confident that if these existed now, they would be just as corrupt as they were then, but back when the internet was new and unknown, chatting in these spaces felt pioneering. People were even more anonymous back then, too; chat rooms were less like a cesspool and more like a tide pool, filled with the bad and the good; filled with creatures attempting to thrive in an environment. And when those environments failed, you moved to proto-social media–AIM, a place where you could directly talk to your friends.
But it’s 2023 now. Everything is a Brand and/or a Monetization. Nobody scrolls through social media attempting to socialize. Imagine the “social” part in tiny font and the “media” part in giant font, emblazoned with a ™ symbol at the end, to remind you to watch what you say, you don’t want to infringe on copyrights and trademarks, okay? We’ll see you in court!
Mastodon changed that, but for how long? And can a post-Twitter social media site ever work the same way? Twitter was a, pardon the term, zeitgeist. It was a sociological petrie dish, and we were the bacteria, squiggling around, trying to figure out what this thing was. And then the Arab Spring happened, and people suddenly realized that Twitter was an excellent place for news. News news news. And thus the site had A Purpose™, a direction. This, in a way, killed the site for those of us who liked to tweet stupid, silly things. But it drew visitors which meant eyeballs with pocketbooks for advertisers. It was only a matter of time before it became Brand and Monetization.
So when people fled to new social media sites after Elon Musk displayed his flagrant stupidity like a hippo flicking its shit all willy nilly with its tail, we didn’t do so with a sense of exploration of something new, we did so already “knowing what Twitter was supposed to be.” This infection of knowledge ultimately soured Mastodon for me.
For example, look at this post, which was on the Explore page of Mastodon, a page that showcases some of the more popular posts on the site:
Now, before you’re like “Josh hates gay people,” my point with this example is not specifically that I hate gay people (I don’t), it’s generally that this post is self-righteous and annoying. But apparently it’s the kind of discourse people like, a real “preaching to the choir” type of post that is easy to like, because it’s funny and it’s pertinent to the LGBTQ crowd. It’s not just LGBTQ though, it’s politics in general, and money, and, in Mastodon’s case, an excessive amount of software engineering and programming/
I just find this kind of stuff boring and uninspired. It’s why I muted George Takei, a popular social media figure both on Twitter and on Mastodon. Or Robert Reich (father of College Humor/Dropout founder Sam Reich, by the way). If you like “old men writing pithy statements about politics,” then those two are perfect for you. But I just, desperately at this point in my life, want to use a social media site where we don’t talk about politics. Not because I hate politics or because I am apolitical, but because there is no site where we just have fun and enjoy life anymore. In order to make that experience happen, we have to curate it. We have to mute and block and craft our social media experience, as if social media were a bonsai tree. If I owned a house where all the rooms except one had toilets in them, you’d bet your ass I’d seek solace in the toilet-free room.
In real life, you can easily enjoy time without politics, without ads, without brands (well, maybe not this one). Online, every. single. site is trying to pull you in one direction or another, trying to anger you or make you cry. Yes, there are some terrible things going on in the world right now, which is why it’s even more important that there are places you can go where you don’t have to look at it. I don’t think the men, women, and children in Gaza right now would want to force you into their world everywhere you look.
We don’t have to sit and simmer in the boiling pot just because someone else is in there already. The problem with social media is–it’s all a boiling pot, because the investors, the venture capitalists, the billionaires, want it to boil. They need it to boil, because it’s easier to extract money when the humans have boiled for a few hours.
I don’t have an answer to this. I don’t think the majority of us can answer this, really, except to stop using social media sites. To put our eyes and our money somewhere else. Maybe I haven’t found the right crowd. Maybe I’m just sick of constantly pruning the bonsai tree. But this is my primary reason for getting away from social media for 2024, to escape the constant boiling, to let the bonsai tree grow, to take a breather from the constant churning of Brands and Monetization.
I recommend you do the same. And turn off your notifications! You don’t need to be notified of everything all the time.
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