I shut down the Mastodon instance I was running today, literally just now. Over the holiday break, as I was moving, I used Mastodon very little and found I didn’t really miss it. Micro-blogging or short form social media was interesting back in 2006 when Twitter first started. It was a lot of people just sharing what they were up to, what they liked, and so on. But social media is different now. Instagram and Facebook accelerated us into a moment where we are all extremely image obsessed, and Twitter somehow became the place online where you cultivated and maintained your political image. The Twitter users migrating to Mastodon brought this idea with them, and a lot of posts are just people broadcasting their political beliefs as incontrovertible truths that everyone must adhere to. It’s exhausting and I’m over it.

It would be nice if we could someday get back to social media as something we use to broadcast our interests and hobbies to the world, instead of using it as a way to bludgeon people into submission with our thoughts and feelings.