Hello World
It has been a while since I have blogged, let alone on a daily basis. But I now feel the need to express my feelings, more than the last couple of years. I have been on Twitter since 2009 and loved the platform and even the intimacy at that time. I moved from my blog to this new micro-blog and liked it a lot, especially the interaction with other users and the real world relationships that came out of it. Meeting people IRL (in real life) was a thing at that time. And I think that for the next 6 to 7 years it was my go to platform. I can see, at least, two moments in that time when things started shifting. The first was Brexit and the social media campaigns that tried to influence people to be either pro or against the Brexit. As we later learned, Camebridge Analytica played a big role in this. Most of this was being done on Facebook, but Twitter didn't stay clean from it. This was later followed by the Trump campaign for his first presidency in 2016, which polarized the social media platforms even more. It was at that time when Twitter started to lose my interest, at least as a publishing platform. For news it was, and sometimes still is, a great platform and sometimes the first to read things.
In 2021 Trump got suspended from Twitter, two days after the attack of the US Capitol. At that time the polarization of the platform couldn't have been worse. We were in the middle of a pandemic and had a president that wouldn't want to give up his power. Twitter was not the only platform to ban Trump, he got suspended on a lot more platforms. After these bans Trump went to court to fight the censorship of these platforms, which were against free speech. To stop the moderation on Twitter and enable free speech, Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it to X. This brought a lot of controversy, not only by users, but also by Twitter employees. A lot of them left the platform. This is when Mastodon got more and more popular, and when Jack, the former CEO of Twitter, started BlueSky, both an alternative to Twitter.
Mastodon and the underlying ActivityPub protocol have been around since 2018. The idea was/is to federate social instances that can exchange messages together, without them being all in one platform. This democratizes the protocol and prevents single actors to capture or change the platform.
I have been on Mastodon and on BlueSky, at least since Twitter started to derail. But like said earlier, I have been a consumer most of the time, on any platform. This changes today. Today I will remove my account on X. Not just stop posting or even consuming, no, actually deleting my account. There are two major reasons for that. the first is that the polarization on the platform has grown so much that I cannot handle it anymore. The other is that I sometimes find myself looking at videos for more time than I intended. I cannot proof it, but it feels to may that the algorithms like there are on Tik-Tok and Facebook to grab and keep your attention, also have been moved to X. My timeline is not anymore from the people that I follow. It is an algorithm timeline to grab and keep my attention.
I think I will move my consumption to Mastodon and even start to do some more micro-publishing again. But that what I once liked, longer form posts, will be done here.