We Are Witnessing the Last Gasps of the Timeline Era

I did it. I deleted my profiles on Mastodon, Bluesky, and Twitter. Now it’s time to write down All the Thoughts™, as is customary. I am now one of the enlightened, free from the shackles of the perpetual scrolling machine. I must broadcast my decision to the heavens for all to enjoy.

Sarcasm aside, I have been bored of the timeline era for a while now and an election year is a great time to cut back on the social cacophony. My Twitter account had been dormant for a couple years and it felt good to delete it. I had barely gotten started on Bluesky. And Mastodon had become increasingly unpleasant to visit.

Mastodon was like going to work and having the same small talk about the same things every day. Mastodon this, fediverse that. Yes those megacorps are bad, use this tech, oh no don’t use that tech. Have you heard of Firefox? I based my entire identity and resulting superiority complex on the fact that I use Linux, you should “just” use Linux too. Why are you doing things differently from the idiosyncratic way I do them? ActivityPub is the one true protocol! Federate with us! No, too much federation, go away. Hey we’re getting spammed, let’s spam the timeline with posts about the spam. Oooh, instance drama. Here’s another blog post complaining about Mastodon. Too meta? Well just wait, Meta is coming and we really don’t like that!

Like okay cool we got decentralized social networking and it’s big now, but can we please talk about anything else? It’s like starting a blog and then talking about the blog all the time. Whoops.

And I’m glad your experience has been different from mine. I love that for you and you can add it to your big Scrapbook of Opinions, never to see the light of day. I carefully pruned my followed accounts like a deranged digital arborist and my filters were so effective they filtered posts that contained none of the keywords. I window-shopped all of the instances. All. If there was a way to make things better, I tried it. None of those things solved the problem, because the problem is me.

Okay, the rant engine is slowing to a stop now. I’m thankful for the incredibly cool people I interacted with on Mastodon over the past couple of years. Ya’ll are great and I follow many of your blogs. Keep posting.

Social protocols are neat and I hope they get more popular. I’m getting off the train for a while though. I won’t rule out getting on again in the future, but for now I’ve got the blog and the feeds and it feels nice.