been thinking about social media lately

15 Sep, 2025

not sure i have the brainpower to actually express a coherent point here but i've been thinking a lot lately about social media.

i'm still on twitter. i have a huge number of keyword filters on there and have trained my algo over time to show me almost exclusively japanese-language posts about things like stuffed toys, old computers, mascots, pets, food, etc. i do not speak japanese. in general the feed is still a positive space for me because of this; it mostly shows me cute animals and stuff i like. i still use twitter quite a lot for a few reasons:

• my partner uses it and we spend all day finding cute or funny posts to send each other.
• i don't know where else i would be able to find content like the japanese furby fandom
• i do have a handful of friends still active on the site
• i need a brain dump of some kind and it used to serve that purpose for me

the last point is what i've been thinking a lot about lately. a lot of my friends have left by now, and my friends that remain don't really see or interact with my posts that often. i'm not one of those people that desperately needs social media validation to function, but it's a little depressing to post art that i've made and get 0 reactions to it. makes you wonder "does this just suck and i'm blind to it?"¹ but i think it's more likely that the way the feed has changed since The Takeover means fewer people are seeing my posts. in some ways that's fine, good even, but it does tend to give the sense of being totally alone in a crowded space. and it just used to be so different.

thinking about that + the way that reddit also used to be very different has led me to form a hazy kind of theory about spaces on the internet. i think it's not possible for a social space on the internet to succeed as both a product for sale and a fun space to be in forever -- once the site hits a certain critical mass of users, one or the other has got to give. jeff says he thinks that point is about when the space becomes "a normal part of everyday life"; a thing everyone knows about and uses, like when our parents started using facebook.

been thinking plenty lately about how i miss irc and how i'd really like to have friends to go on irc with me or to make a bbs for or a website or something. something outside of social media. but i don't really have those people anymore, a lot of them have gone away, and i'm sort of friendless as a rule anyway because i'm just not so good at forming and retaining friendships, and also even when those things were the thing to do it was hard to get people to do them back then. even if i were to find a group of people who wanted to do that stuff i would have a hard time joining such a group because i'm pretty socially anxious; i'm a lifelong lurker. but anyway that stuff only bothers me some of the time.

i guess it would just be nice to feel like i had friends that shared my interests. i briefly considered rejoining a discord i used to be in that would welcome me back but then i thought about how everyone there wants to talk about politics, and the ways in which they want to talk about politics, and immediately nixed the idea. i used to want to talk about politics but these days i can't imagine anything more dreadful. both the politics and the conversations.

so anyway i've really just been pouring all my time and energy and money into getting really good at cooking dinner.