I recently bit the bullet and signed up with Mastodon. I’m not saying it finally happened because Elon Musk went through the convolutions of trying to rebrand Twitter overnight and he’s increasingly using the platform as a mouthpiece for Russian propaganda, but it’s absolutely a contributing factor.

I’ll freely admit that I have gotten spoiled by Twitter’s ability to aggregate most of the information that I want – especially in the breaking national and international news and pop culture categories. Whether that ends up being enough of a reason to stick around remains to be seen. 

I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that my screwing around trying to set up my account on Mastodon didn’t raise (or reinforce) other, larger questions about my consumption of social media. I wonder if there’s much actual value beyond self-advertising and self-aggrandizement to compulsively flicking from Facebook to Twitter to Instagram to Threads to Mastodon – especially as the social media universe further fragments. I wonder if perhaps it’s time to descope my online presence rather than continue to add to it. Of course I’ve been wondering about that for a long while.

It’s a question of value added. Am I getting more out of these platforms than I’m sinking into their upkeep and maintenance. With a little honest self-reflection, the answer to that question is probably no. They’re all burning up time that I could likely reallocate to some higher purpose.

I’m not going to launch into a screed about mindfulness or any of that nonsense. There are times when pure, mindless scrolling is precisely what’s called for… but maybe it would be for the better for me if it were happening just a little less frequently. Whether I’ll do anything about that or just let inertia carry me along, though, remains to be seen.