Status Update

I do like this time of year. I also like Mondays, change and novelty. I like being able to start again. Over and over again.

Yesterday I got rid of my Mastodon account. This was for the third time. I'd been giving it a go this time round since October 23rd last year. Working my way through the settings. Putting up a profile. Finding people and accounts to follow. Creating lists. Scanning through timelines. Responding to the odd post. Good feelings from posts being marked a favourite or boosted. Delighted to get the odd reply or follow. Soon turned out the balance between time spent and value gained was way off. I fell into mindless scrolling. Aware of my vulnerability to the sunk cost fallacy I thought it would be in my best interests to delete the account sooner rather than later.

I have done similar before. First with Flickr. A brief dalliance with MySpace then Facebook. Mastodon and Diaspora in 2019. I used Strava for a while. My experience of them all has been very similar. The initial distraction of setting up the account. Gratifying validation from likes / thumbs up or whatever one click acknowledgment tool was provided. Before long the feeling of being a bystander has emerged. It would then only be a matter of time befoe throwing in the towel and deleting the account.

I asked a friend I met for a drink last week about their experience with social media. I asked as I had always found him to be entertaining and good company. The kind of person that gets and holds the attention of others. He said he no longer used social media much any more. His experience sounded a little bit like mine.

I have put stuff up on the internet since way back when. I started my first homespun blog in the late 90s. I followed this up with a WordPress site for a decade or so. I have had a go with two or three Listed blogs. Oddly the one I have maintained most consistently and longest is completely private.

Quite recently I purchased a couple of domain names. This was initially because of involvement as a beta tester of Libre.fm, which is being redeveloped. I thought to use the first one I bought here on Listed for a custom domain. That did not work for some reason with the one I got from PorkBun. I saw what looked like a cheap and interesting offer from omg.lol and thought to see if that would work. It has not. Not sure why. Same as the PorkBun domain it redirects to the Listed homepage instead of this blog on Listed. Support emails have been submitted and responded to but the issue is still to be resolved.