cw: trump, twitter, somewhat fatalistic views of internet freedom in the US
So apparently Trump is now in a feud with Twitter, and Twitter continues to be an absolute shitshow hellsite. My ideal form of microblogging on socializing is….. absolutely not Twitter lol. It sucks, though, because so many of my RPG, accessibility, and tech industry friends and acquaintances are only really on Twitter! I’ve gone on and off of using Mastodon for the last few years, but it can’t really replace Twitter for me, as it’s an entirely separate segment of folks I know who use it.
I did a “no drama or discourse” digital shabbat with Adira last week and it was really really good for me. Our goal was to “not be exposed to Discourse, Hot Takes, drama, and stress.” The rules were:
- No Twitter at all.
- Only “safe” parts of reddit about benign things.
- Avoid anything that discusses media in anything more than “gosh this is so nice!” ways. No discourse or deep critical analysis.
- No TV/movies/comics/books etc about above stressful things either.
- No discord servers or channels with the above. No vent channels or complaining channels.
- Promote good vibes.
I’m definitely going to repeat it again this week, with almost no changes. Anyways, my point is that the stress that Twitter induces in me, combined with the US executive branch apparently going to war with tech companies that already support Nazis and bigotry means I need to evaluate my relationship with the indie web. I should probably take inventory of the current status of my conversion from big tech services to indieweb and self-hosted options. Bluh, maybe during the next digital shabbat. I’ll count it as like self-reflection and self-improvement work.
Well anyways, this and my other sites are self-hosted, but I have to check if my cloud servers are in the US, or what. My main concern is how the hell I’d stay in contact with folks if corporate-controlled tech is suddenly way less safe or available.