no-more-tweets/

[giscus[bot]]

no-more-tweets/

Short "personal" update that you might not care about.

https://toniogela.dev/no-more-tweets/

[alexandru]

👋 I'm reading your blog.

Blogging is alive and well, and I'm actually getting more eyeballs on my blog than from social media, always did. That's because social media posts are fleeing, whereas blog posts get links and are also indexed by search engines (for however long that lasts).

Note that with a blog, the one person you're targeting is yourself. That you get some audience out of it, that's just a bonus. Social media OTOH makes people dumber.

Note that Mastodon or any other social media alternative isn't any better, unless you aggressively curate your timeline of crap, which includes all political content or celebrity gossip. This means unfollowing people that you'd like to follow, but that are attracted to discussing the current thing, and junk is junk, regardless of who's posting. And there's plenty of toxicity and junk on Mastodon or Bluesky. I once thought that the culprit was “the algorithm” that encourages yellow journalism and drama, however, even without the algorithm, people will naturally seek shallow drama on social media. I now think the main problem is the format itself, i.e., the short posts, with the notifications, the likes, the retweets and all that gamification that Mastodon/Bluesky gladly copied.

Keep calm and keep blogging 🙏

[TonioGela]

Thanks @alexandru, I wasn't expecting a reaction so soon and I'm glad that you're a reader of this poorly updated blog.

Note that with a blog, the one person you're targeting is yourself.

This is so true, and my lack of commitment to this blog (lack of published articles or amount of half-written drafts) represents quite well how poorly organized I've been recently, something that is partially due to the excess of stimuli (good or bad) to which Twitter was contributing.

junk is junk, regardless of who's posting

Also true, and that's why I've decided to do not simply migrate over Bluesky or similar services.

all that gamification that Mastodon/Bluesky gladly copied

The only true reason I'm keeping my mastodon account open is that it's still making me feel like having a connection to a carefully selected list (71 atm) of people from the Scala community I'm willing to have news from (something that atm I feel like desiring). Luckily enough, there's still a general lack of usage/users with respect to Twitter, something that makes the overall scrolling experience repetitive and pretty boring pretty soon, moving my attention towards more interesting "things to do".

[...] the one person you're targeting is yourself [...]
[...] Keep calm and keep blogging 🙏 [...]

Funnily enough, while writing the post I was thinking whether to add a mission statement like "expect that this will cause me to write more personal and less Scala related content to this blog" but I eventually did not as I thought that personal/non-Scala related posts might have collided with the initial idea that lead me into opening this blog. In this sense, your words sound like a (possibly unintentional) blessing to do so, so thank you 🙏