Man, I miss the old days of Twitter. Before it became a hell hole, and even before it became a giant advertising venue. When it was just a bunch of nerds talking about random stuff all day, every day. It was like a community snowball. You’d have a few people you followed and then you’d follow some of the people they followed and pretty soon you had this nice community of folks to talk with.

Then Ashton Kutcher discovered Twitter and that was the start of the end. Soon the rest of hollywood was there, then the politicians, then every brand had a twitter handle and the noise level grew and grew. And then, y’know, Musk.

I’ve tried other services and the only one that really stuck was Google Plus, but then Google shut that down. The rest all seemed transitory or made finding a community so hard it wasn’t worth the effort.

Eventually I settled on Mastodon, and that was good for a while until my interests diverged from that of ‘the gang’ I was following. It was the sin of finding AI fun and interesting that did it. No longer did I feel comfortable talking about things I was interested in. I’m adding AI to religion and politics as the topics you should never discuss in public!

So I moved to Bluesky and using that has been pretty much like shouting into the void. Very few people respond in any way. There are maybe 3 or 4 people I interact with their every so often. Maybe its me? Maybe I’m not putting sufficient effort into making connections?

Oddly the one place I now use more than anything else is Facebook. I wound up there through a round-about path. One of the generative AI services I use gives your free credits if you post your creation on Instagram, so I started doing that even though I don’t actually use Instagram. But I didn’t realize posting to Instagram also posts to Facebook. I’d forgotten I even HAD the Facebook account (created when I got Quest VR and it required a Facebook account). But folks I’ve known for decades started reacting to my posts so I went over there to respond and find I actually have more interactions there than anywhere else (tho still not much).

Still, it’s nothing like the old Twitter. I remember joining others in live tweeting events like gaming dog and pony shows or infamously bad movies like Sharknado. It was like watching something in an auditorium with a bunch of friends shouting comments to each other while somehow not distracting from the main stage.

Anyway, I guess we’ve moved on from those times. And maybe it’s OK. I probably spend my time more productively now than when I was heavily into social media. I watch a lot of informational YouTube, or do online classes and things like that. Or I code on hobbiest projects. None of these are earth shattering changes but I guess they feel slightly more productive (though not as fun) as talking with friends.

Anyway, on the off chance anyone has noticed that I don’t post often on ‘the socials’ these days, now you know why. But I am good, things are good. We’re excited about the upcoming move. We still miss our Lola but other than that, knock on wood, we are doing pretty well all in all. And PartPurple is still on Mastodon so if anything dramatic happens to us she’ll probably share it.

In the meantime I’ve moved my AI and tech discussions over to my other blog, Smith Talks Tech. Since I know AI upsets a lot of people I figured it made sense to separate it from my gaming talk here at Dragonchasers.

I’ll resist the urge to add an AI generated image to the top of this post out of respect for anyone on Mastodon who happens to follow the link here, since I do think I’ll share this post over there as a kind of official “So long, thanks for all the good times, see you again when the wheel turns.”