Our attention
Last week a solicitor came to our door selling the usual house upgrades: new roof, windows, even solar panels. Normally I would say no thanks and they would be on their way, but just the day before I had been thinking about solar, so I figured sure, actually I am interested in solar panels one day, maybe in a few years. They can hand me a flyer.
Somehow I fell into the sales funnel trap. The conversation went from “we can look at satellite photos of your roof to give you an estimate” to them handing me their phone to talk to the guy who scheduled appointments. It kept escalating from there, a little bit each time, until the next day someone shows up at my door to give me the estimate, but they actually need to come inside my house and go over our electricity bill.
I’m a patient person, but this had eaten up way too much of my time. I had to turn them away, apologizing as they gave me a guilt trip that they had driven an hour and a half to get here. The whole thing was what I joke about as delay fish. I could finally see what should’ve been obvious right away: this was all a huge waste of time.
This is a long introduction to saying that I’m making a couple changes to my social media diet.
I’ve disabled federation of my blog posts and I’m muting everything I get from Mastodon. Most people are great, but something feels broken over there, divisive, and the risk of getting angry replies is too much right now. I really need to focus.
An interesting side effect of the Mastodon model is that someone who runs their own community has fewer checks on their influence. They can spread misinformation, but they can’t be reported, because they are also the judge for moderation decisions.
You could say the same thing about my influence on Micro.blog. This is why I’m extremely careful never to attack other people or stoke any fires of outrage. I want our team to be firefighters not arsonists. And of course it’s easy to export your data and move.
I think someone should explore this in more detail. But for now, back to my decision to have a quieter timeline, with fewer people monopolizing my attention.
I blogged earlier this year about filter bubbles and the new settings in Micro.blog to help you manage how your posts and replies go to the fediverse. This is the first time I’ve actually used the “mute everything” setting. It works!
There are many ways to follow my blog. RSS, Micro.blog, weekly emails, and cross-posts to Bluesky. And there are multiple ways to get in touch with me. I’m also still getting replies from Bluesky, which automatically show up in the mentions tab in Micro.blog.
Thanks as always for everyone’s support. Seeya on the open web.