My troubled history with social media continues. For the past year or so (I can’t remember when exactly I left Instagram for good), my only social media presence has been on Mastodon. I like it, in the abstract and from a technical point of view. I like that it is decentralized (no trusting a benevolent overlord required) and federated. It’s been somewhat of a life-line: enough to keep me up-to-date with a subset of web-industry movers and shakers.

But since the initial excitement of leaving Twitter and reestablishing a network in a less toxic and yet-to-be-enshittified environment, it’s felt a bit stagnant and limited to web dev and tech folks. Nice but not exciting. Now, to be fair, a lot of that is because I’m primarily a lurker. I’m not great at self-promotion and tend toward humbleness when considering whether to share an opinion publicly. I’m not sure I should expect to behave differently on BlueSky, but I’m gonna give it a go. And while my mental state and use of free time is without a doubt much better under an extremely limited social media regime, I do miss aspects of it.

Knowing what colleagues are talking about is nice.

Keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances is nice.

I wish I didn’t have to hitch my wagon to a tech platform to reap those benefits, but the BlueSky vibes so far feel good. Maybe I’ll see you there? I’m @osterman.dev