My weekend started Friday and we were changing the clocks. With the Twitter takeover, I started wondering if I should leave that space and this prompted a bigger reflexion about how I want to use my time and get informed.
Social media, and even Internet were not a thing for a big part of my life (yes I’m that old ahahaha!). I used internet early but I came to Social Media quite late.
I can’t remember the year I join LinkedIn, it was probably when I started looking for roles in Scotland in 2015 (?)
I never read my feed that much. This space is way too ‘fake’ for me, there is a lot of pretending. But when you look for new jobs, it’s useful to ‘put yourself out there’ . I use it for messaging or to post things around accessibility/inclusion and giving advice for people trying to start new roles in government or design. I don’t get much info from it, but I don’t spend a lot of time there, so I’m happy to keep it for now.
I can’t remember exactly when I joined. I was running my own French classes at the time so it was useful to advertise them. It was also useful to see what was going on locally and to keep in touch with friends in France.
I think I left in 2020. I never regretted my decision. I got a lot of time back from not checking it. I did lose track of what some ‘friends’ are doing and probably have miss wishing some birthdays 😉 but other than that, it was a good move.
It took me a while to warm up to Twitter. I joined in 2017 as it felt like it was the best place to understand and learn from the design community at a time where I was transitioning from Software development to Design. But it was also a lot of people venting or complaining about services or companies. A bit like when at the office a colleague is on the phone next to you to complain about a delivery or a service provider: do I really want to hear about this? no, unless it’s funny but it’s rarely funny.
A lot of people also use Twitter like LinkedIn for self-promotion. Putting big ideas and principles out there which are often not really what they put in practice in their work once you know them a bit better. The tweets around the recent SDinGOV conference were very symptomatic of this: a lot of people were claiming to be big on inclusion, but the majority of photos of the events were posted without alt text by attendees, and I’ve only seen one speaker sharing their slides publicly. It feels really weird to me to be speaking about inclusion and at the same time not sharing your slides.
Twitter served its purpose for me: over the years, I’ve learned a lot about design on it, but also about Accessibility and Neurodiversity. I’ve got more to learn but now Twitter is a lot of noise too. Too much noise and it feels wrong to me to stay on it considering what it might become now.
So…I started a big tidy-up: I’ve reviewed the list of things/people I follow and reduced it drastically. Was 500+ and now is a more healthy 100+. My plan is to only occasionally check twitter instead of checking it daily, and see if I miss a lot of info or not. I’ve removed the app from my phone to limit the temptation. I’ll probably stop checking eventually.
Mastodon
Hmmm… not sure what to think about it yet. My ‘home feed’ is not super relevant just now but improving. The local feed is puzzling me a little. It’s about people from my server/instance which is a Scottish one: Mastodon.scot.
You can find me here. I don’t think I’m going to post much for a while though and will mostly observe like I did when I first joined Twitter.
If you are looking for help about Mastodon, these links could be useful:
- to join Mastodon
- an increasingly less-brief guide to Mastodon on Github, by Joyeusenoelle
- 10 quick Mastodon tips by Per Axbom
- 4 Twitter features Mastodon is better for not having by Scot.mn
- Fedi.Tips – an unofficial guide to mastodon & the Fediverse for non technical people
- Twittodon – Find and follow your Twitter friends on Mastodon
- Home invasion – Very good read: explains how the waves of new people joining Mastodon from Twitter felt to people who had been there for a while
Alternatives sources of info
A lot of people I follow have newsletters you can subscribe to or blogs. I registered to a few.
RSS feed is another option I could use more. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It helps you stay up-to-date with blogs, websites and social media channels in one place.
It’s an aggregator. Instead of visiting many places, you subscribe to sites to receive notifications of new posts and read them in an RSS reader, like Feedly for example.
It wasn’t used that much anymore since it was created (1995!), but it’s making a come back.
You can learn more about What’s an RSS Feed? (And Where to Get It) on Lifewire.
You can subscribe to the RSS feed for my blog.
What’s next?
Time will tell. I think I might manage to get rid of Twitter just like I got rid of Facebook. Not sure I’ll ever be very big on Mastodon but that’s ok, I’m getting time back and I’m spending less time on my phone as a result.
I’ve not been very active here on this blog lately. I do have notes from a book to add as a blog post, and if I read more books, I might share more notes about them too in the future.
So if you want to stay in touch you can subscribe to my blog. Don’t worry, you probably won’t be flooded with notifications of new blog posts hahaaha!