i've been kinda drifting off of here again for a few reasons. dunno if i'll ever be back to the degree i was originally. it just isn't really fun

here's a big part of the reason

if you lock a post, that's great; only followers can see it. but... anybody can follow you, unless you lock your account. but if you lock your account, then *nobody* can follow you, even for your basic posts.

you end up in a weird hell where you have protected stuff you don't want widely available but also want your open posts to be. open. and followable for people.

also, and thankfully i haven't had it here, but like. the constant instance uncertainty in what's going to happen is a greeeeeat way to make it not feel like it's worth being on here.

yeah cool i love setting up stuff and getting all snuggled up into a fun instance only for the owner to say "welp that's it, bye! lol" or just vanish and then poof it's all fucking gone

the alternative is running your own instance, but if you decide to do any customizations to it at all to fix 's constant inane ui decisions then you quickly find yourself stuck in an outdated hell from which you will never return, so either you end up getting cut off for being Too Outdated or nobody wants to share the instance, so you're maintaining a server for... one whole person. lots of work for literally no value, fun

with tweetdeck i have nicely compartmentalized accounts all in one place; private, public, ui rage, fun. here i have to have a separate tab for each, or hope that whatever tools there are are compatible with the various different version apis, and so on and so forth

its just not worth the mental energy investment. this place has good people, but it's just too tiring when you have to constantly keep your balance because the ground is constantly quaking

idk. with twitter you at least get the comfort of "it's a huge company and the chances of some Fun Issue coming up that totally fragment your social circles is slim to none" (barring their idiotic management), here it's like a constant. i got tired of hearing about how instance xxxxxx was shutting down so now everyone's moving to [their fifth instance] and it's just. completely god damn exhausting

mastodon improved some aspects of twitter but got some other stuff super wrong. it's an immense beast that requires *constant* maintenance or it chokes itself, it's federated so you get to exposed to a bunch of wildly different rulesets/expectations, and you get none of the actual value that like. decentralizing has. you get no local community, no nothing. it sucks

"but local timeline" yeah if you wanna also expose yourself to the fed timeline which at this point is just. lmaooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

ive thought about it a lot more and i just honest to god miss the early fuckin internet when you did shit at your own pace and stuff was largely separated and not connected in one gigantic clusterfuck of a network with fifty different conflicting goals.

i wrote about it a bunch here as usual https://jul.rustedlogic.net/thread.php?pid=459310#459310

mastodon is still built on the ~engagements~ and ~interactions~ paradigm where by default it has that feedback loop of "yay people are liking/favoriting/sharing my stuff" which is great if your goal is to be viral but it really fuckin sucks when you post something you thought was good and you can visually see it get zero traction compared to your zero-effort shitpost that blew up the universe

"but you can disable likes and boost notifications and whatnot!"

thats great and all except theyre still, you know, there.

excessively long story extremely short: mastodon is too mentally taxing to use between stability-anxiety, privacy levels, and how complicated/engagement-driven everything is

twitter lightens the cognitive load so it wins the twitter/masto fight but this awful social media bullshit is the root of the problem and i fuckin hate it.