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

Internet connectivity in New Zealand seemed to be a precious and limited resource. In the hotel we stayed at in Auckland, wifi came with the room, but I was limited to 200MB of data transfer per day before they started charging. In the hotel we stayed at in National Park I was able to purchase slow but unlimited wifi for $4/day. And of course the rate that Verizon would have charged was so absurdly high I turned off mobile data for the entire trip and kept my phone off except when using wifi to check email.

The result? I spent ten days without Twitter and Facebook and all the other, lesser variants of social media — and it was kind of nice. I got a lot more reading done than I usually manage. I was less worried about what people were saying, or if it was a conversation I should be involved in, or if anyone was talking about me or to me… The experience was relaxing, and it left me feeling less anxious and less scattered.

I’ve been online a lot since I got back, but that’s in large part because I’ve been writing blog posts like this one. Going forward, I want to spend far less time online, and more time writing, reading, and just living. I’ve got no intention of abandoning an online presence — there’s a lot to be learned and gained and given in online relationships — but there are also many other ways to make better use of my time. Hopefully, I won’t be hanging out quite so much on Twitter.

I saw three great blog posts this week on writers and publishing.

First, Tobias Buckell explains why writers are crazy, and makes a few suggestions on how to hold on to what sanity remains to us.

This failure to pay attention to what we can control as authors and what we can’t leads to a form of Cargo Cult neuroses in writers out of a desire to recreate milestone successes that were never in their primary power to recreate.

If you’re a struggling writer (and how many of us aren’t struggling?), read this post. It will give you an entirely new way to look at things.

Second, Chuck Wendig has some very useful thoughts on social media.

You are not a brand. Social media is not your platform… see it instead as a place where you can bring all the crazy and compelling facets of your personality to bear on an unsuspecting populace your audience. People want to follow other people. People don’t want to follow brands.

I’ve come to this conclusion too, mostly because there’s no way I can “act” as a “brand” no matter what social media gurus tell us we should do. Read the rest of the post if you have a chance. We all need to do self-promotion, and Chuck has a lot of suggestions that make sense to me.

And finally…

A few people have asked what I think about the “agency model.” This refers to a requirement by certain large publishers that their ebooks shall not be discounted by retailers such as Amazon. So if a publisher specifies that a new ebook by a big name author shall be priced at $14.99, that ebook will be sold for $14.99 and not a penny less.

So what do I think of the agency model? I love it! Because it’s surely helping to keep ebook prices from dropping through the floor. Mike Shatzkin feels the same way. Here’s part of what he has to say on the subject:

All writers, whether they’re among the fortunate ones that have a publisher pushing them or whether they’re trying to do it themselves, should be grateful that publishers are doing their damnedest to maintain prices and the perception of value for writers’ work.

Very, very few writers will ever make a living selling 99-cent ebooks. Personally, I want to make a living writing so I can keep writing–and the agency model makes my books a really good deal, while still allowing me a reasonable profit on each sale, as well as “a perception of value.”