I took facebook off my phone, because the dopamine hit of refreshing to see what comments or interactions I had was getting in the way of all the other things I wanted to do with my life. Anytime I have felt tempted to go back on that, I’ve felt grateful for how incredibly difficult facebook has made it to sign in. I don’t know my credentials by heart, so I can’t even sign in on a browser on my phone, “just this once, just for a minute.” But since then, I’ve been noticing how *badly* facebook runs, even on my laptop. People comment on my posts, or reply to my comments elsewhere, and it’s hit or miss whether or not I’ll get a notification. Then I get repeated notifications for stuff I’ve already seen. And of course there’s all the spammy llm-generated feel-good slop posts that I have to wade through to find out what’s going on in my friends’ lives.

Meanwhile, there’s instagram, which has broken its browser features, and everybody knows this, and somehow that’s just the way it is and the way it will remain. If I click on a notification, it will not take me to the post in question. And, of course, Insta *never* (in recent memory) allowed me to reshare stuff on the browser, only on the phone. However, I’m not really about snapping photos, taking selfies, or filming myself. Words are my thing, and pictures of myself make me cringe painfully. My Insta content is mostly memes, and those are most easily uploaded on a browser, not a phone.

So there’s one major platform that I can only access on my browser, and one that only works on my phone.

Then there’s the platform formerly known as Twitter, which has been overrun by the nastiest people in our society. That’s enough said about that.

Which brings me to Bluesky. Bluesky leans left politically, as do I. But I’m somewhere in between democrats and leftists, and all I see when I log in is leftists blaming democrats for everything wrong in the world or democrats blaming leftists for everything wrong in the world, with the occasional documentation of the flood of authoritarianism and anti-lgbtq+ and anti-immigrant government actions sweeping our country. Bluesky is a great place to go if I want to feel depressed, I guess.

Last time I logged on to Mastodon I swear I saw a tumbleweed roll past.

I’ve never really enjoyed Discord, which I know is not the same kind of platform as the others I’ve mentioned, but seems worth lumping in. I log on maybe once a month, wait for my 15 updates to install, check my notifications and find that they don’t actually lead to any interactions with me, and log off for another month.

So maybe everything old is new again and it’s time to start putting my thoughts and feelings here. Or maybe this feeling will last for a week and I’ll remember that nobody will actually read what I post here, and I’ll get tired of talking into the wind. We’ll see.

But I’ve also been finding that I don’t remember the cool things I’ve experienced as well as I wish I did, and I’ve been craving a way to document them. I visit amazing towns and then find that I don’t remember where I saw X or what I thought of Y. So even if nobody reads anything, it might be nice for me to be able to look and remember what I did when.

Who knows?