Published: 2024-11-30

I'm an introvert by nature, does that mean that I'm shy, reserved, and quiet? No, it doesn't. I mean, I'm all those things, but not because of my introversion! I see introversion as a way to appreciate not only the things — and the people — around me, but also the living manifestation of my inner self: my thoughts.

I have spent more time with my thoughts than with any other human being during my lifetime, I have been more intimate with my thoughts than with anybody else, I have laughed with my thoughts, cried with my thoughts, taken refuge in my thoughts, confided in my thoughts, you get the picture, my life is a continuous conversation with my self, especially when I am at my quietest, but that does not mean there is not anything I want to say, and that is where the written word enters the picture, including texting, blogging, writing in the sand, and maybe most importantly social media.

Putting the "anti-" in social media

I never saw social media the same way "normal" people around me did, I started using MySpace during my high school years because as Bender said in Futurama's season 2, episode 4, Fry and the Slurm Factory: "Everybody was doing it, I just wanted to be popular", staying connected was important to people around me, so it meant it has to be important to me too, right? I did not have a personal computer or laptop around that time — we are talking late 2000s here — so I would go to a cyber café and pay around 50 cents an hour to hook up to the World Wide Web, all in the name of staying in touch.

Then it came Facebook, and despite my objections to moving from MySpace, my "friends" had already started doing so, I kept insisting on fighting a lost battle, like using 8-tracks in the Compact Disc era — although who am I kidding, I haven't even seen an 8-track before, that's way before my time. Maybe cassette tapes? — eventually, I gave in and did so too, it was my last year of high school, so maybe it was worth it to keep in touch with all my "friends", right? — spoiler alert: almost 15 years and multiple Facebook accounts later I have no idea where all these people are or how they are doing.

Highschool came and went, we are now in the 2010s, computers and internet access is now more affordable than ever, still, not everybody in the neighborhood can pay for one or the other, let alone both, so the neighbors that could actually afford one or multiple computers and a 512Kbps internet plan — or in the best case scenario 1Mbps — would gladly hook you up to their router for a monthly fee, even if you lived across the street — which in my case I did — or 300 meters from them. Carpooling, sharing your Netflix password, crashing at a friend's couch, community will always beat the system.

Shoutout to my big brother for not only getting a laptop and letting me use it — more than he ever did — but also for paying our neighbor Piro to hook us up to her router, despite how messed up our relationship has been, I love you brother. Also, there is no way in hell you are reading this, you would have to learn a whole other language to do so, so who cares.

It is during this period that social media becomes an integral part of my life, I dare to say I get addicted to social media during this time, even if I don't share that many pictures or stories about my life I am seemingly always on social media, reading other people's jokes, playing games, following Facebook pages and groups, befriending people for the fun of it, in summary being online for the sake of being online. Then I discovered something even better: Twitter.

Since Twitter got invented, bathroom doors all over the world have been the cleanest.

— Someone for sure, but I cannot remember who.

I always come back to this quote because I find it very powerful, as an introvert what I wanted from social media was not a way of staying in contact with people I honestly did not care that much about — that comes from my inability to create meaningful connections with people, and that in turn comes from personal trauma, it has nothing to do with the people around me — but a way to turn my thoughts into something material and let them float in the cyberspace, I wanted to parse my thoughts into zeros and ones, or at the very least HTML nodes traveling through HTTP, it's not that you couldn't do that on Facebook, it is just that it felt too intimate to me, and I was not open to that, Twitter on the other hand was perfect! Think of something, make it 140 characters or less, say it, bam! You're done, next! To that add the possibility to connect with anybody around the world who cares about what you are saying by just adding that stupid tic-tac-toe box in front of a word, which is called a hashtag, because we need a catchy name for everything, and of course it will retain their anglo saxon catchy name anywhere in the world because we are living in a connected age now and Silicon Valley dictates how these things go, but I digress.

Not only could you easily connect with people with the same interests as you on Twitter by just "tweeting" about the stuff you cared about, but you could follow the topics that people were talking the most about in real-time, there was an earthquake? Surely people are flooding Twitter with the hashtag #Earthquake, did Leonardo DiCaprio finally got that Oscar? I see, that's why I'm seeing the hashtag #LeonardoDiCaprio trending globally. It was, in my opinion, exactly what social interactions on the internet were supposed to be, just people talking about everything and nothing at all, in real-time, with no pressure to collect "friends", because the fun of it was in connecting with people regardless of if you knew them, or not.

At this point we are entering the mid-2010s and honestly, the next 10 years are not relevant to the story I want to tell here, so allow me to come back to the present day.

Social media in the present day and beyond

Much has happened since the days I discovered social media, a lot more happened even before I was able to use a computer, Twitter and MSN are gone, so are AOL, IRC — not really but you get the idea — and most web forums, much have changed but people still have stuff to say, people still want to talk about their favorite music, and TV shows, and videogames, and food, their hobbies, new and innovative ways of doing stuff, their trauma, their passions, their way of living, as I said before community will always beat the system — look at this guy repeating himself like he is a big shot or something — and as long as people have something to say others will listen, even if sometimes feels like we are screaming into the void.

Mainstream social media is still being used by billions, and although social media has empowered people all over the world, people who wouldn't have a voice otherwise, it has also "given a voice to people that should never have been given one", I can't even remember where I read that last quote but to the person that came up with it, damn, you're right! Mainstream social media has made the spread of cyberbullying; misinformation; bigotry and radical ideas like misogyny, homophobia, racism, fascism, etc. easier than ever, giving ill-intended groups platforms to target and harass other people and encourage others to do the same, what's worse, these mainstream platforms are notorious for doing nothing to protect these targeted groups or to block access to the ill-intended ones, as long as you keep feeding the algorithm they don't care.

The good thing is people are expressing themselves in other ways too, although not as prevalent as before, dedicated web forums are still around, some of them still using table-based designs like it's the pre-HTML 5 age, and other people are hosting their own websites, WordPress is more popular than ever, and other similar tools allow you to have a website up and running in minutes, but more importantly people are starting to care more about their privacy and reject mainstream social media, people want to own their data the same way they want to own their music and TV shows, and the only way to do that is giving the finger to the people that don't want you to do so and shouting to their face FUCK YOU.

This is when alternative social media enters the picture, and unlike alternative medicine, this thing does work, for the most part at least. We all want different things in life, and we all expect different things from life, some people use social media because they want to connect with friends and family, others were born into social media and see it not as something you opt-in, but something integral to their lives, the same way television was for my generation and the radio was for my parents'. Depending on what you want, and expect from social media, one platform could resonate more or less with you, so it's normal that alternative social media might not resonate with people who value an endless stream of mind-numbing content over their privacy, and that's OK, I think.

Now let's talk about the Mastodon in the room.

Fediverse, the future or failure? I don't give a fuck

I'll be referring mainly to Mastodon here, so even if I say Fediverse please assume I'm talking about Mastodon. Yes, I know they are two different things, and yes, I'll still go ahead and use the terms interchangeably.

Allow me to go straight to the point here: I don't care if Mastodon fails or not, I don't care if other platforms get more users than Mastodon, and I don't care if Mastodon stagnates and stays niche forever. I should clarify that I do want the platform to prosper, to grow, and to keep improving, but these topics that seem to concern so many people for one reason or another don't concern me at all.

Seeing the world the way I do implies not giving much importance to what most other people think and/or say, I'm on the Fediverse because people who unknowingly have changed my life are there, their influence means more to me than that of the millions of users on other social platforms, and the connections I've made on there so far are more meaningful than most of the ones I made with the people I came across on other social media platforms during my 15-year-long social media journey, I want to see the people behind these avatars as real individuals and not as a collection of HTML nodes traveling over HTTP, and I feel Mastodon helps me to do that in a way that other social media platforms simply can not.

And that's how I met your mother why I am on Mastodon, and that's why I created this blog, and that's why I'm writing this long post, even when it was supposed to be a cheap throwaway one with the overall message of "look, I created a blog that I'll probably never update, here's a post, I had thoughts and I had to write them" but then I actually started writing, and I went into a stream of consciousness, and I kept writing until this was the final product, so if for whatever reason you stopped to read my ramblings about everything — and nothing at all — thank you.