Remapping My Digital Footprint

Twit­ter’s volatil­i­ty has me rethink­ing every­thing. Words like “inten­tion­al­i­ty” spring to mind, but also, I don’t need to be on the plat­form quite as much as I have been since 2008. It’s offer­ing an oppor­tu­ni­ty to rethink how I show up online and where I choose to cre­ate and con­sume con­tent. Not the first time, cer­tain­ly not the last, but one of those, you know, inflec­tion points that gives you a moment to pause and reflect.

Have I been doing it wrong the whole time? Maybe I have.

I’ll unpack that. I just logged into Feed­ly for the first time since Google Read­er shut down in 2013. It was like open­ing a bunker that closed the moment the war end­ed. There were blog posts wait­ing for me from cor­po­rate sites I used to fol­low for work and thou­sands of unread music and tech news items from near­ly a decade ago. It was rev­e­la­to­ry. It was the web we lost!

Flash for­ward a decade. We’ve been con­tend­ing with algo­rith­mic feeds at every turn. Even a glimpse of a pure­ly chrono­log­i­cal time­line made me thing: what if I just go back? I can’t pre­tend any­one will fol­low suit, but how can I make my own expe­ri­ence of the web better?

For starters, I’m going to sub­scribe to Feed­ly. I’m using Dis­cord to keep in touch with com­mu­ni­ties I’m part of on Twit­ter that are dis­pers­ing. I’m play­ing with Red­dit more inten­tion­al­ly. I’m lov­ing Patre­on and Mix­cloud and pod­casts. I’m obsessed with Tik­Tok. I just edit­ed way back on Insta­gram fol­lows and pro­duced a bet­ter expe­ri­ence. And I’ve joined Mastodon.

Mastodon? Isn’t that just Twit­ter all over again? Maybe it is? But maybe it’s not. I am being very selec­tive about how I build com­mu­ni­ty there. I’m not try­ing to build what I’m leav­ing on Twit­ter. I’ve built an audi­ence around loca­tions and jobs, first as a music crit­ic in Philadel­phia and then as a cor­po­rate com­mu­ni­ca­tor there and Detroit, across three indus­tries. The effect is like watch­ing those chunks of the inter­net per­form Google search­es in real time around the clock. It’s exhaust­ing. It’s self-inflict­ed. It’s over.

What I’m lov­ing about onboard­ing to Mastodon is how slow it is. I’m remind­ed of those ear­ly days on Twit­ter when you saw every­one’s @ replies and you held on for dear life. But this isn’t like that. I’m look­ing for some famil­iar faces and then look­ing at who they’re fol­low­ing and who’s fol­low­ing them. What I’m try­ing to do is build some­thing around my inter­ests in music and cul­ture and leav­ing work to LinkedIn. There’s a slow­er web if you want it!

If you’re feel­ing com­plete­ly wiped out by the expe­ri­ence of try­ing to repli­cate what you feel you’ve lost, build some­thing bet­ter slowly.