The week between Christmas and New Year’s Day is always weird to me. On one hand, work is quiet so I’m able to get things organized in my professional life for the New Year. On the other hand I know in the back of my head that New Year’s Day is just an arbitrary moment in time and there’s nothing really that magical about it. Hence why I tend to think of the Winter Solstice as the beginning of a new cycle instead of the 1st of January.
But this week of in between is also when I tend to have time to tinker around with projects and think about positive things I want do when things ramp up to full speed after the holidays. One of the things I’m doing is “tightening up” my social media presence. I’ve talked about this before, quite a lot actually, and this year I’m being a little bit more realistic about things.
Instead of declaring that I’m dumping social media, which I won’t, I’m reducing my social media presence a bit. Ironically, what’s old becomes new again and I’m starting to discover more personal blogs to follow through folks I follow on Mastodon.
If you visit my blog via the web interface, you’ll notice the blogroll is expanding. I cleaned up the old “Blogroll”, eliminating blogs that haven’t been around a long while. Those that remain are now in the “Legacy Blogroll”. I’ve followed these blogs for a long, long time; they’re primarily from the days before social media infested our existence.
You’ll also notice a new category called “Blog Resurgence”. These are newer blogs I follow via RSS, or Really Simple Syndication. I’m going to write a separate blog entry on how RSS can work for you, so strap yourself in for that. The RSS protocol has been around for a very long time and powers a lot of things, including blogs like this very one you’re reading right now.
The “Blog Resurgence” category is a work in process and will continue to be built out and otherwise tweaked over the next several days. I encourage you to follow along if you’re so inclined.
So what about Social Media? Well, Facebook and Instagram are both run by an evil company and while I haven’t abandoned the platform, I have again removed IG from my phone and only access it via web browser. I gave up on Threads. I also gave up on the new, but unrelated BlueSky. The “limited number of characters” updates from me appear only on Mastodon. I like the folks I have found on there.
Unlike my earlier forays where I interacted with primarily folks from the gay community, these days I’m interacting with folks from all persuasions all over the world and I am a better person for it. Since Mastodon tends to put the power of content in the hands of the user, instead of a sick algorithm determining things on behalf of a large for-profit corporation, I’m content with sticking with Mastodon.
I’m also giving PixelFed another run in lieu of posting to Instagram all the time. I’ve had a bit of time making PixelFed “sticky” (don’t read into that) for me, but I’m giving it another go.
But honestly, I’m most excited about long form blogs like this one and discovering them again like I did like 20 years ago.
It’s giving me the inspiration to actually write again!
