The social networking dilemma

I was never fond of using social networks. Nothing before Facebook was that relevant, and when Facebook became the thing I was a college student. At that time I didn’t like the fact that my real name and real life with pictures would be publicly available to anyone interested. After a few years, I started to use Twitter as a place where I could just push my thoughts on life and software development without much personal information being pushed into the wild. Now I’m questioning if this is still the best way to do social networking for me.

To be clear, I don’t share my picture or pictures of my family that easily with the public. I don’t have a profile picture on WhatsApp and I don’t use Instagram. Twitter is the place where I push my short thoughts on the current stuff, but in recent years this is happening so rarely that I don’t think Twitter is the right social network for me anymore. Nowadays I use it only to follow some interesting people there, but that list is also quite short. This and the reasons my friend Merlin listed here make me consider if there may be a better social network for me. Sometimes I think I’m missing a lot of interesting content from social networks, those where most of the people are: Facebook and Instagram. Maybe I could create an Instagram account and start following some interesting people.

The reason why I didn’t do this before is I dislike Facebook, or Meta if you like because of its privacy controversies. I honestly believe they are doing some evil stuff and have serious privacy issues. I know nothing bad would happen to me if I would use it and I may start to use it in a limited amount.

Another network I’m considering is Mastodon. I only know it exists as an alternative to Twitter. It’s probably better at privacy, but I’m not sure about the user base. If I’m trying to get to interesting people and content then it may not be here. I’m also aware Mastodon is geeky, they have the word “server” in the app description :)

The thing is, I don’t even have or want to spend a significant amount of time on social networks, I can only trade part of my time spent on Twitter for some other network and try it out. I’ll update you when something happens on this matter.

[UPDATE] After creating an account on Mastodon and trying it out for a few days, I have just delete the account. There’s nothing interesting there for me unfortunately. In the meantime I created an Instagram account and followed two accounts which I knew were there but not on Twitter. Let’s see if it will take me to find more content on Instagram than on Twitter.

[UPDATE 2] It seems Instagram isn’t working for me as I expected. As I can see everyday people scrolling and browsing Instagram and looking at all those cool stories (and ads) I wanted to try that experience. But after adding a few accounts that interest me, it didn’t take me into that experience. I expected it will throw more and more content and accounts that I would want to follow but it didn’t and soon it started to feel boring. To be honest, I didn’t install the app on my phone and used it only on my laptop, but nevertheless I think if it was the right app for me to use it would become more interesting, not less. I might check it out here and there because some interesting people are present only on Instagram but I dont’t think it will ever become a go-to app for me. in the meantime, I’m unfollowing some accounts on Twitter because I noticed they became not interesting to me. I feel like some day I’ll also not see enough of content there to check open the app multiple times per day. For now I feel like maybe writing more here on my personal page might be the best option.