blaugust week 1: antisocial media
over the past 4 months or so i've done a lot to break with mainstream social media and it turns out the rumors are true. your life and mental health will improve greatly. there's one exception to that decision, and it's not because i somehow can't get rid of it. it's that i really, genuinely don't want to.
i love tumblr! it’s been my main online space since 2012 when i left livejournal and in terms of sheer joyful chaos it comes as close as social media can to the indie web. the user base is mystifying. corporations whose how-do-you-do-fellow-kids posts do massive numbers elsewhere got laughed off the platform ages ago. we made up a 1970s martin scorsese mafia movie and it was so fun that when it broke containment martin scorsese himself ended up playing along. (tiktok tried to pull off their own goncharov a couple of years later but it didn’t stick because it turned out to be a marketing ploy).
the algorithm is so bad it somehow loops back around to making the user experience actually pretty good (if you only follow a dozen people, the ‘for you’ page is going to be... mostly posts from those people). the april fools’ pranks are fun. it’s been bought and sold several times, at one point for less than a particularly expensive tuna fish. it’s so comically unprofitable it’s really a wonder it’s still up at all. it’s cringey and clever and many other things. you can clock bots a mile away.
it’s still social media, meaning a twitter/instagram-style dash, limited customization, censorship (tumblr, being tumblr, can’t help being accidentally funny about that either). outside your bubble there be dragons, and no amount of curation is going to keep them off your dash forever. there’s still rage bait and i still fall for it more than i’d like. i still scroll mindlessly instead of exploring. but there are enough legitimate reasons to enjoy it and i do! i fucking love tumblr!
although i'm completely off mainstream social media now and all the happier for it, i’m not going to delete my tumblr account for reasons i think are pretty obvious at this point. i announced an indefinite hiatus and i plan on dropping in 1-2 times a month to scroll through my dash and check some fandom stuff. which is all to say, i want to break the fomo and be more deliberate in the way i use it. if something is metaphorically speaking on fire, i’ll hear about it and decide if i care or not.