When the waltz of the absurd began between Twitter’s Board of Directors and Elon Musk, I blithely assured myself it would lead to nothing—so you can see how skilled I am at predicting the future. My own Twitter experience hasn’t really changed, except I’m trying to break the habit and so I’m hardly there anymore. I have been spending time scrolling on Mastodon, though not posting much. It’s a quiet time for me. I don’t feel like I have a lot to say right now—the lateness of this post being evidence of that.

As I come to understand Mastodon, I find the way it works quite interesting. The biggest factor in its favor is that no single person or Board of Directors can ever control it, which is awesome. The confusing bit is that you have to select a server—or be admitted to one—that will be your home base.

A cool thing is that any person or organization willing to take the trouble and spend the money can set up their own Mastodon server, aka “instance.” Why would you want to do this? Probably because you’re a curious techie willing to take on extra work! But the advantage is you can invite only who you like and who you can get along with to be on that server. Why is this good? Well, because Mastodon offers multiple timelines. One of these is “local” and the local timeline lets you follow posts and boosts (similar to retweets) only from those who “live” on your server.

But, whatever. I’ve been looking only at the “home” timeline which shows me posts and boosts by those I follow. This is the same way I interacted with Twitter and it worked for me. So it doesn’t really matter what server I’m on. I think, from my few weeks of observation, that small servers are subject to the same hazard as small towns—content moderation might become overly strict as in “we don’t want to talk about that here.” In contrast, big servers might enjoy the anonymity of big cities and only the most egregious behavior will be called out. But that’s just speculation.

I’m on a big server run by the founders of Mastodon which seemed like a safe and available choice at the time I signed up (though I think it’s closed for new signups now).

If you’re on Mastodon or decide to give it a try, find me here:
https://mastodon.online/@LindaNagata

Or in the Mastodon search box:
@LindaNagata@mastodon.online

This is a post about partially disengaging from social media—primarily Twitter.

Yesterday I returned home from a nine-day trip to Japan. We had Internet while there, but I didn’t post anything on Twitter or Facebook, and only briefly checked what others were posting — and it was nice to take a break.

Twitter can be fun, and it can be a fantastic source for links to cutting edge science, technology, politics, or whatever you might be interested in. For writers like me, with strong hermit tendencies, it’s also a means to interact on occasion with fellow humans…or perhaps just to lurk and observe the interactions of fellow humans.

But for me, more and more, Twitter has gotten to be about what it shouldn’t be about: measuring my own popularity — or lack thereof! 😉

Welcome to Insecure Writerland!, where the brain becomes absorbed with such critical questions as:

Aside from social validation, the other great illusory promise of Twitter for hermit writers like me is that it offers a means of influencing the course of a career. Back in the old days, a book was published and either magic happened and sales took off or, more likely, magic didn’t happen and the book quickly went out of print. Sure, you could go to conventions and try to push the book to target readers and maybe that would get you some momentum, but from a return-on-investment perspective, money spent on conventions will never be made up in book sales, unless you are already a big-name writer. (This is especially true if you live in Hawaii, and have to fly to the mainland.)

So social media feels empowering because it’s a way to promote your work, and maybe survive as a writer, without emptying the bank account. I do think social media is helpful. For writers with skills at this social stuff I think it helps a lot. But you get what you give. (Maybe. Sort of. If you’re lucky.) In any case, growing an audience takes time and talent that might otherwise be spent writing.

So yesterday when I reappeared on Twitter and asked:

Back from Japan. Did anyone miss me?

— Linda Nagata (@LindaNagata) April 20, 2016

…it was something of an experiment, a means of checking my Twitter footprint — and at first it didn’t look like I had one! 😉

In the end though, I got some likes and some responses, and it’s all good.

Still, I am a hermit writer. I do better work when I’m focused on the work, rather than on whether or not I’ve managed to get a response out of Twitter.

So I’m going to try to blog a little bit more and check in on Twitter a lot less. My time away taught me that it’s at least possible to disengage from social media. We’ll see how it goes long term.

Oh, and expect a couple of brief posts on Japan!

Living in the Uttermost West, we operate on Hawaiian Standard Time (HST). Since we don’t do daylight savings in Hawaii, we are five hours behind the eastern USA in the winter, and six hours behind in the summer. The time difference with the west coast is two and three hours, depending on the season.

We are, for practical purposes, the last. There is another time zone beyond us, though I’m not sure if anyone lives there. Move just a little bit farther west and you cross the International Date Line and jump a day ahead.

One drawback of living here is when government or corporate reps forget there is a time difference and call at 5:30 in the morning. Business people will often have to be up for conference calls at 5:00am. And I’ve always thought stock traders must be challenged when they have to get up everyday at 3:30am for market opening.

One cool thing about living here that I’ve only recently become aware of is that our day overlaps in interesting ways with the days of other people around the world–something that’s become obvious to me by using twitter.

By the time I get up in the morning, generally around 6am, my twitter streams are full because people in the mainland USA have been awake for hours. It’s midday on the east coast and things are slowing down a bit. The Brits will soon be winding up their day.

Activity is pretty steady for hours after that. Very distracting! But towards evening here things can get very quiet as the mainland USA winds down. People from Hawaii seem to post a lot at this time. Ultimately, the Brits start showing up again. I follow a couple people in southeast Asia, but not closely enough that I’ve figured out their schedules yet.

Anyway, I enjoy the daily rhythm. And yes, I spend too much time online.