After considering Mastodon, I’ve concluded I’m not going to do any microblogging at all, other than to notify of my entries to my zettelkasten and other publications. Discord, Slack, Twitch, and KEG cover the communications needs I have. It’s just more valuable to isolate communications to those who actually matter, to actively curate my in-bound signals and make sure specific, important people have priority in my limited daily reading time.
Good people have nothing I care to hear. Microblogging involves hearing from people about their cats as well as their latest Kubernetes discoveries. This would not be that big of a hassle if there were a reliable, easy way to search through or even filter such content, but microblogging makes this very hard. Some of the most amazing people I’ve ever known are not people I want to hear from on a daily basis. There’s just too much noise to filter out from the signal.
You cannot compose a full thought. Microblogging format punishes those who use more than 100 characters even if allowed to write that much.
You cannot dialog. There is no real-time interaction.
You are plagued with “me too”. Everyone agreeing becomes a burden to slog through. Better to read the well-thought responses than just the thumbs-up posts.
You are rewarded for conclusions without explanation. Not only is there no room to present all your reasoning, people are bored by it. Instead, you get grandiose, baiting proclamations like “Rust is the future” only to be left why you wasted your time even reading that thread in the first place with no substantiation for the claim. This is one place academic writing, as boring and annoying as it is to create, wins on merit because making any conclusion without multiple citations and references is strongly frowned upon, not rewarded.
You have constant FOMO. There is no way to keep up with all the blogging so you never feel like you have had time to consume even those you feel are worth following. It is far more valuable to isolate your interactions to a few subject matter experts who take the time to compose their thoughts well and dismiss the FOMO completely. Sure lots of people will have micro-thoughts to go with their micro-blogs, but they are of micro-significance. This is one fact I’ve been smacked over the head with over and over. All that time wasted reading, drama, grifting, shill, and unsubstantiated conclusions when I should have been keeping up with the latest TJ Holowaychuk creations and Rob Pike musings. Better to identify individuals and engage with and in response to them specifically. It’s a much better investment of time over hoping something will come across your microblogging feed that turns out to be significant.
You are simply not free to speak your mind. Every microblogging platform is centralized and censored. Yes, even creating your own server counts as being centralized. As such it is implicitly impossible not to be subjected to someone’s interpretation of proper “terms of service.” This is the antithesis of freedom. Even if you don’t want to rock the boat, or be rude, every single post you make is being evaluated for being “acceptable” or not. While some “speech” isn’t protected under certain laws, those laws are somewhat fluid and capricious, and subject to interpretation. Some say this makes being a gatekeeper for one’s own community preferable. But the energy required to find the right community, with gatekeepers who share your values, and self-censor appropriately hoping you never write the “wrong” thing is fucking exhausting. Who wants to live in constant fear of saying something that might strain a friendship with the community or moderators?