<p>…and the way that makes me post is catching up to me.</p> <p>I joined Twitter in 2010 and started planning my escape in 2022. The whole time I never broke 400 followers, and I saw it as a failure on my part. (Truthfully, it was the enshittification of search and recommendations, but I digress.) The secret blessing of both <em>being</em> a nobody, <em>and</em> algorithms designed to <em><strong>keep</strong></em> me a nobody, was that I could always microblog the most silly, inconsequential things, and they’d never get completely swept up, blown up, into the algorithms.</p> <p>Being on Twitter for a little over a decade, microblogging has become part of how I think and write about my own thoughts and experiences. My paper journal is in microblog format. (Try it! Way easier than a full-day recap in the evening.) I write longer thoughts like this blog post by starting in tiny little bullet-point tweets and expanding on each one.</p> <p>I like being <em>real</em> and being <em><strong>funny</strong></em>… I don’t take myself too seriously, online. I’m not professionally in any creative industries, and I don’t make studio-apartment-level money being a content creator. So, I like to post as if I’m, Just A Person™, but I’m starting to get why the people I perceive as being above me, don’t.</p> <p class="has-text-align-center"><em><strong>THESE DRIVE-BY REPLIES GO ABSOLUTELY CRAZY, LET ME TELL YA!</strong></em></p> <p>If you post like you have 300 followers (but have way more, for better or worse), it goes a little something like this.</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>Something you think of off the top of your head, a silly scribble you finished, whatever it is: something you think your m8s will get a kick out of: you make it.</li> <li>You type it into the post box, cause you wanna show your m8s.</li> <li>You post it. Especially with little/few hashtags cause discovery wasn’t the point.</li> <li>The post resonates with its intended audience. <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>This is where, in an ideal world, I’m happy, I Win, The End, and the process stops, but nah it keeps going.</li> </ol> </li> <li>Your post gets swept up by some sort of algorithm or feed because algorithms decide it’s “a Universally Good Post™”. <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>(NO IT’S NOT IT’S JUST FOR MY FRIENDS AND PEOPLE WHO GET IT—).</li> </ol> </li> <li>People who don’t know the context of you, your account, your vibes, your interests, your dislikes, your goals, your hopes, your dreams, etc. start leaving the most <em><strong>uninformed,</strong></em> “you wouldn’t say/comment that if you knew me”-type replies and quotes you’ve ever seen. 💀</li> </ol> <p>Cause due to them finding your post out of context from like, the ✨Discover Feed,✨ or a ReSkeet 10-levels-of-mutuality detached from you: all the replier has to go off of, is the text (and embeds) that’s in the body of the post, not your full account history, or even a week of following you to figure out what you’re about.</p> <p class="has-text-align-center"><em><strong>AND IT SUCKS, BRO, IT MAKES POSTING NOT FUN…</strong></em></p> <p>I try to tell myself I don’t have to like or reply to the “ok, <em>obviously</em> you don’t go here” type replies and quote-ReSkeets but it’s hard, cause:</p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>it makes me feel like I’m ignoring people. I don’t like feeling ignored, so I project/sympathize.</li> <li>one of my least favorite things is being misunderstood, so I always get the instinct to overcorrect.</li> </ol> <p>The Popular Internet Creative Guy™ solution to this is to just have a very boring, tidy, curated, professional account where you don’t post about what you <em>think or feel</em>, only posting about what you <em><strong>make</strong></em>. But that’d be the end of my growth online (which I need to maintain cause I don’t want to go back to my job at The Everything Store™) cause,</p> <p class="has-text-align-center"><em><strong>I’m not an Art God!</strong></em></p> <p>I can just <em><strong>tell</strong></em> that people follow me more for my personhood than any artistic skill. Sometimes you can just tell. It’s easy for me to tell because my <em><strong>yapping posts</strong></em> always wildly outperform my art posts!!!!!</p> <p>IDK what to do. I was first online in the early 2000s. Being online is my home, and being <em>myself</em> online is natural to me.</p> <p>Another Popular Internet Creative Guy™ solution is to <em><strong>✨Make a Discord™✨</strong></em>. After working a draining retail job, my valuing of time has increased exponentially, and that includes how I value other people’s time.</p> <p class="has-text-align-center"><em><strong>How many “Internet-Guy-That-I-Like” Discords can ONE PERSON join before feeling stretched thin?</strong></em></p> <ol class="wp-block-list"> <li>I don’t want to add to that stretching-thin of other people.</li> <li>Nor do I want to play Favorite Internet Guy™ Olympics against other Favorite Internet Guy™s over who gets to be the Internet Guy Discord server with active members in it. I don’t want to fight other Creators™ over Enjoyers™, if that makes sense.</li> </ol> <p>Also saying this as someone that hit the max (free-tier) Discord-server-join-count and is only active in like 3-5 servers despite that. Like: it feels like a crapshoot going “hey, all the Real Ones™!! Join my Discord server!1!!1!!”</p> <p>But I feel with the growth of BlueSky and the resulting growth of Drive-By-Reply-Guy Behavior comes a desire for closed-off community with “the Real Ones™”, and I can feel it in myself too, but IDK how to properly facilitate that.</p> <p>The only thing I can think of for now is to still publish my (socially acceptable) thoughts and feelings in a way where there’s more of an upfront thought-barrier. Like, this blog post you have to sit down and read through paragraphs if you’re gonna respond to it, unlike tweets/skeets/toots where you can let your eyes glide over them and “reply” in half a second. Zines and comics are another form of communication where people have to actively engage with the work/thoughts, getting to know the mind behind them as they do, before they open their mouths (or wiggle their keyboard fingers).</p> <p>Maybe.</p> <p>IDK.</p> <p class="has-text-align-center"><em><strong>WE’LL SEE, I GUESS.</strong></em></p> <p></p>