Shoutouts to @bradenslen @dancohen @kicks in my latest broadside Rebuilding the Web

@donmacdonald (Strange that this didn’t show up in my ‘mentions’—wonder what else I am not replying to—)

Even aside from any larger societal impact, I can’t say that anything I have done on social media has been nearly as worthwhile. The past year, since about March, I’ve committed to spending less time on social media, and my creative output is way up.

I think this is so encouraging—maybe the most encouraging thing one can say! Can you point to what is causing this? Is it the feeling of working for yourself, rather than—as you say—giving ‘free labor’ to the CorpASAs?

@kicks I'm kind of conflating personal and social in my post. I'm not so much motivated by the fact that I find self-hosted independent web sites to be more ideologically congenial (though I certainly do), it's just that it's so much easier to use Twitter (or Facebook) to simply consume. I can spend hours just reading journalists’ radio chatter on Twitter. Blogs, micro.blog, demand more intention. It's not as easy to simply coast, I can get done reading blogs, and creating a half-decent blog post is much harder than sending a tweet. I like to add art to mine, so there needs to be at least a photo (I prefer a drawing). But, the end result is far more gratifying. There's something you can point to and say there, I did that.

So, to answer your question: no, the feeling of working for myself is not so much a motivation (I create because I like to create), but it is the way I prefer to create. Since I feel compelled to do this stuff, it's much better to be doing it on my own terms. And it turns out that removing the anti-patterns of big social also removes some major inhibitions to creation.

@donmacdonald Ok, so if I’m reading you right here: when you move away from a crowd of people, there are fewer conversations to have—so you can decide to just go home. Is that closer? This almost sounds like a case for making discovery difficult. We don’t want to spend all our time searching fruitlessly—if it’s too easy to find things, then we just follow those trails. If it’s true, I wonder why the “searching fruitlessly” is something we will stop doing—while the “reading fruitlessly” is still something compelling.