• 09 Dec, 2025 *

I’ve never been a big social media person. Ironic, considering how much of my life I waste online. Something about the Facebooks and the Twitters and Reddits of the world never did it for me. I’d love to launch into a diatribe about how I’ve always hated these corporations and that we should go back to the old days of the internet with message boards and instant messaging and something about IRC. But truthfully, I don’t care. I didn’t participate in forums much back in the day, and the only person I irced was my family. Irked. That joke would work better spoken, I think? Maybe not.

I’ve had accounts on all the Facegramredderspaces of the world, mostly because I felt like I had to for the sake of my YouTube channel and writing career. I rarely posted and when I did, it fell into one of two categories – shamelessly spamming my work or a spur-of-the-moment angry tweet that I almost always regretted later. I never actively engaged with them, rarely responded to other peoples posts, and sweet-buttery-Christ did I never respond to anyone who commented on my posts.

The awful corporations behind those social media sites was also a factor. I realized as early as 2013 that the people running these places were terrible and that their popularity would have a negative effect on the world. Don’t call me a prophet, I simple have eyes and a brain.

Mastodon and Lemmy feel different. No, this isn’t an ad. No, I’m not going to breathlessly talk about how great these platforms are and how they’re going to revolutionize the world. You can’t run out of breath when you’re typing. But I will acknowledge they’re pretty darn good.

The decentralized nature of these platforms have eliminated a lot of the big problems these sites suffer from. No evil owner with the power to influence elections. You can join any instance you want, and still see other posts from other instances. You really get the sense that these places are a community. I think a lot of that really comes down to how small they still are, though. There simply aren’t enough people to justify a billion spam bots, ads, or trolls (mostly).

And that’s the dilemma with anything. Once it gets popular, it loses what made it so special. The washed masses insist on taking their scrub brushes to these grungy, weird places that thrive on their eccentricities and turn them into gentrified neighborhoods, plastering them with novelty “I [heart emoji] Mastodon” stickers as they tell us about how Hilary Clinton was right all along and oh my god, new Disney movie! Lemmy’s already getting some of those communities springing up, sadly.

I think Mastodon and Lemmy are the perfect size right now, and that’s probably not going to change. I mean, it can’t by definition. There are so many instances that none will ever get too big, except maybe the default Mastodon.social.

Still, despite my interest in them, I’m careful to avoid posting or looking at them too often. I know all too well the dangers of becoming addicted to social media. Constantly scrolling, scrolling, and scrolling on your phone, desperate to know what some random person thinks about every random topic under the sun. It doesn’t matter. It’s not worth spending so much of your time on this crap. Read a book, watch a movie, exercise. Maybe read a blog by a guy who doesn’t seem to know when to shut up?

I don’t use either of them super often, and admittedly most of the time when I do I link to my blogs or videos, but every so often I feel compelled to post something. Lemmy has that “old school Reddit” feel where people need an answer or advice about something and you just want to help them. That’s nice.