Simon Woods

(I’m getting this bullshit out of my system.)

Potential Twitter set-up:

• Tiny follow list, mostly read in a RSS reader via Feedbin’s brilliant integration.
• Everything else followed via lists, with the Pinned Lists feature in the first-party app.

As far as settings go, that depends on how the above works out. If I end up following a larger group of people than intended (for example, if the pinned lists and RSS integration don’t work well, as I’m sure Twitter would prefer) there will be no retweets in my timeline, I’ll constantly keep the chronological option switched on, and will maintain a significant list of filters.

I love third-party apps but am convinced they’re not long for this world. Honestly, even with this specific set-up the whole point is to make it easier to stay away from the empty-headed, addictive use of a platform that is designed specifically to inspire that behaviour. As such, I’ll have time limits in place, which is a big part of my life anyway what with having more than one job and actual responsibilities with actual consequences if they aren’t fulfilled.

Oh, and if you’re reading this and follow me over there please don’t be offended if I don’t [pound-sign]FollowBack. That’s just now I use these things and that is unlikely to ever change.

OK. Let’s see if that has flushed this nonsense from my mind, at least in its current state of heistant wreckage.

Lately I continue to think about my social network conundrum.

I have wittled down my indecision to just Twitter. It’s easy enough for me to draw the line with regard to personal use of the other big social networks, at least for now.

All that’s left at this point is to weigh the effort of maintaining a non-terrible experience against losing the good people who are exclusive to that platform. Even with RSS, awesome smaller networks like that of Micro.blog, and newsletters the fact remains that a number of people are fun to follow blogging-wise and they do so exclusively on Twitter.

This is an issue I would like to resolve, at least for the foreseeable future. To some extent it is a waste of my time, a distraction, and not the good kind. This is exactly what I am determined to avoid as much as possible.

Anyway. Blogging about blogging. I’m super fucking original that way.

… I have always thought of Facebook as a necessary evil.

– Luis Gabriel Santiago Alvarado, I don’t know anymore!

A familiar feeling with which I empathise. The behemoths of the social web (silo platforms) have been constructed to have this exact effect on as many people as possible.

Joyce Garcia agrees:

It’s very heartening to know that I’m not the only one struggling through decisions on the social media morass.

Weighing up the value of where the crowd is, or at least appears to be, against the reality of contributing to a bad thing – often definitely very bad things – is difficult.

People might say “oh but what do you think you’re really contributing by leaving” but the fact remains that as more people leave, even more people feel comfortable doing so; after a few consecutive years of steady decline in activity and visible membership, these silos have no real backup plan on which to rely. They are not web-friendly at all and with that comes the lack of local copies, which means everything just disappears, and people will inevitably see the patently destructive core of these systems.

Even the people who remain in the silos will likely change their approach to them; for example, Twitter as a simple means of producing a microblog feed as well as RSS. Over time enough people are only likely to get smarter about these platforms, in the aggregate, that their move away from the centre of our culture, our very societies is inevitable.

These platforms do not need to disappear; we simply need to put them in their place.