About a year ago, I wrote about the state of things at Twitter. It’s gone worse than I could have imagined, although I won’t cover that here. There are a zillion think pieces on that Musk has done to that company and what it means for Twitter, social media, and our overall discourse. I’ll leave that to the experts. Turns out, I deleted my account completely and spent a lot of time on Mastodon and Threads, once it was released. Both have that “old Twitter” vibe, in different ways.

Still, I think I’m going to keep my distance from both as we head into 2024.

As part of my annual review of subscriptions, I came across my upcoming renewal for the excellent Mastodon client, Ivory. It got me thinking about why I even bother with these sorts of public sites to begin with. Reading a bunch of strangers’ thoughts on tech, sports, politics and whatever else is going on really doesn’t make me feel any better or more informed. Mastodon is great because there is no algorithm and the overall vibes are way better, but it’s still a general waste of my time. Same goes for Threads, which so far has been a big improvement over Twitter but that’s not saying much.

Just like I said last year: I don’t really need any of these sites in my life. It’s not worth it.

For 2024, I’m just going to delete Threads and Ivory off of my phone and I won’t be renewing my subscription to Ivory, despite it being a wonderful app by one of the best developers out there. I want to remove temptation to waste time mindlessly scrolling through those sorts of sites with such little payoff. I’ll continue to use the services via the web, but would rather keep things at arm’s length.

I’ll possibly write more often here when I want to ramble about things. But maybe not.