I’ve become a social media nomad and now that I see it, I’ll probably be more intentional about it.
I’ve stopped going to twitter entirely unless someone links me to something interesting. That’s been that way for a long time.
Most of my social energy the last couple years has been spent in the work slack, which is very active. This is fine, but I don’t want to lose those outside connections.
Mastodon in general has been great as a home base for connecting and random thoughts. I’ve met awesome people. If we’ve chatted, I probably consider them an internet friend.
I’ve been on various slack groups and discords over the years, some of them I’ve been on long enough that they feel like home and where my other internet friends live.
And over the last couple of months I’ve re-engaged with tumblr, which surprised me, but it’s just where I left it years ago and sometimes I need that chaotic rabid fandom energy in my life.
But I don’t feel completely tied down to any of these places and honestly barely spend more than a few minutes a week on any one of them. Some I don’t visit for months at a time. My various websites gather dust too, my profiles rarely get updates. I lurk a lot.
This ties into an idea my family chatted about recently around travel. We don’t travel, for the most part. Most of the world doesn’t travel either, and that’s okay. We talked about where that travel urge came from and if there was a way we would consider doing so. And we thought about migration patterns, the way nomadic tribes follow animal migrations. This is a form of travel, but when you come around to each seasonal place, you’re really home, just a different one. I imagine wealthy people with homes around the world are instinctively doing something similar. They’re not really traveling, because the place the go is familiar, it’s home.
I seem to be doing the same thing with my internet presence. I’m migrating from place to place, never too long in one. I think this is okay, it’s healthy. I’ll keep being a digital nomad, thanks.