tl;dw: The big idea isn’t to cut out technology; the big idea is to use it thoughtfully, and manage its use, in ways that serve your objectives.
This is all fairly obvious shit when you hear it, but I at least am the kind of person who occasionally needs to hear it. It’s the kind of thing that, for example, helps me get over an undue sense of accomplishment at having largely quit social media, and instead try to think intelligently about what I might want to use it for. I’m not 100% that I can go back without the downside of compulsive use, but I am confident that I can try to use it with some intentionality and back off if the return isn’t there. My use case is trying to build some community around my books; so I’m trying to see what it’s like to build a well-calibrated follow list on Bluesky, share booky stuff, and see what’s what. I’m not following the academics, data scientists, and journalists I normally do; for the present experiment, it’s writers and friends only.
I mentioned on a closed, artisanal social network that I looked at the feed created by my first few dozen Bluesky follows and felt exhausted. It turns out that turning off replies in-feed made everything a lot better—I like my follows, but I don’t necessarily like their deracinated comments on posts from folks I don’t follow. But I still want to put a pin in that exhausted feeling. There might be some truth there that the sense of “ooh, Twitter’s back!” is covering up.
Currently reading: NEWBURN vol. 1, by Chip Zdarsky and Jacob Phillips.
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