The slow goodbye to Twitter

👀 I've started an indie publication on Substack, come find me on The Indiependent

I'm emotionally detaching myself from social media.

It seems like every day brings something different to the world of Twitter. Bad business practice. Crazy layoffs. And very questionable behaviour from Elon.

I have no idea what will come next. And if I'm honest about it, I think I don't actually care. Every day that passes I seem to care less and I’m resenting more the distractions and the checking of who said what.

The best way to annoy me is to waste my time. Twitter is increasingly doing that and it’s starting to annoy me.

What I feel Twitter is great for atm is keeping in touch with people. Initial introductions. DMs. And maybe that is how I will look at it, for now at least. I'm a bit tired of everything else tbh.

I’m not closing my accounts(s) down, but I definitely care less and will be posting less. even if that habit is hard to break. I do have a natural instinct to just quickly Tweet what’s on my mind. Partly I need to refrain myself from doing that or directing that energy into my building up my owned following (like I’m doing here with Indiependent).

What social is taking away from us?

Now my mind is shifted away from any emotion about the loss of Twitter and more towards what does Twitter stop us from doing? What is it taking away from us?

When we spend our time on Twitter, we sacrifice our time elsewhere. This is not rocket science. But it does mean that we should think about where we value spending our time.

On your death bed, will you wish you had tweeted more? Not me.

I'm a community person. It's what I fundamentally believe in. More recently, I've been creating and participating in smaller communities. And honestly, I go and check in on those communities before social media and it just feels like a much better balance.

If a good thing comes out of this whole Twitter chaos, I hope that people return to smaller communities, stop caring so much about building an audience and learn to connect authentically again.

Great things can happen amongst a small group of people.

Back to basics with simple blogging, email and communities

I got an invite and set up an account on Post, but honestly, I can’t be bothered. The same goes for Mastadon, I haven’t even set something up there. I don’t need it anymore, I don’t want it, I don’t care for it.

Everyone seems to be searching for the next best tool, but they're missing what we should have all been doing from day 1 - go back to blogging, authentically.

I feel much of these communities can be easily managed with going back to basics with blogging. I personally love Ghost for it's open source and ethics, I use it for Rosieland. Substack, in addition to its great writing and podcasting, increasingly has community features like chat. Or it's not too hard to spin up a Slack or Discord in addition to your blog.

This is partly creating intentional spaces to be around people that are interested in you and what you do. And also create your own rules. When you have your own space on the internet, you have more control, more fun, more flexibility.

And as blogging tools get better we’ll be able to achieve more.

The other side of the coin is creating a way to ‘follow’ other people. When you blog and follow other people blogging your RSS reader becomes your ‘feed’. And it doesn’t have any fancy algorithms.

Adding a blog to your RSS reader and then tagging it helps you create a system and way of following people outside of your email inbox.

This is how mine looks and I like it very much. 😍

I know people will think I’m crazy for maintaining multiple blogs, but I feel it makes sense to me. I want one for each of my special interests.

I have Rosieland for community building stuff. Indiependent for indie business stuff. And another one coming soon for parenting / unschooling stuff.

I’m looking forward to going diving in deeper and I think I can now confidently call myself a writer.