Community
I’ve been taking a break from Mastodon as my social home on the web for about six weeks. It has been more difficult than I’d usually admit.
I have an amazing local community in my town that I love and am deeply involved in. But nobody here is a programmer, or even a computer nerd, so it doesn’t serve my need for a tech community.
I work alone, for myself, in my house. It’s a fortunate lifestyle with many upsides, but it means I don’t get that form of community at work, either.
I’ve had this feeling before… as a teenager in the 1990s.
It’s profoundly lonely.
But when I got internet access, that started to change. I found my people. First in the Total Annihilation community (RIP, Annihilated), then the HardOCP Forum, then the Something Awful Forums, then Tumblr, then Twitter and our community of Apple bloggers, and then Mastodon.
Communities form, change, and dissolve over time. None of those are, today, anything like what they were when I most enjoyed them.
We change, too. I didn’t move on from most of those solely because they changed — it was usually because we both changed, and it was no longer a good fit.
My break from Mastodon has been a relief in some ways, as I’ve felt increasing divergence between what I wanted and what I was getting from it, but I didn’t know where else to go.
Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube are all more video-broadcast platforms than communities. All I’ve found on Bluesky is even more anger and politics, the last things I need or want. Threads hasn’t yet stuck for me, and it’s owned by an asshole. Twitter was an amazing product and community that was previously owned by assholes, and now it’s X, which has a strong but different tech community, and is owned by different assholes.
So I’ve just been… nowhere, for the first time since the 1990s.
It has been, once again, quite lonely.
Sure, it’s been relaxing, too, but in the way a vacation is relaxing. It’s great to take breaks, but after a long vacation, I’m ready to turn my brain back on.
Without participating in a large, broad tech community, I’m exposed to fewer new ideas, both of my main jobs (app development and podcasting) are much harder, the quality and reach of my work have suffered, my skills aren’t improving as much, my mind is less stimulated, and I feel disconnected from my professions and passions. My world has gotten smaller.
I could keep going like this to prove a stubborn victory or purity test, but I’d mostly just be hurting myself.
Communities change, conditions change, and we change. We’re all better off if we’re willing to change our minds, and if our communities let us, no matter how strongly our younger selves declared a previous position.
So I’m going to wade back in and see how it goes, trying to find a better balance to hopefully have better results, including on Mastodon.
My people are spread across multiple services, and I’m going to explore them all, despite most of them being owned by assholes.
I’d love to participate in communities without any assholes benefiting from it, but in the modern world, that simply isn’t possible. The only alternative is to isolate myself and not have a community at all (or a job, or a smartphone, or a computer, or internet access, or a car, or most of my food, or my country).
That’s neither a price I’m willing to pay nor a condition I’d try to impose on anyone else.
I’d love to have your support, forgiveness, and grace as I try to find my people again, and I strive to offer the same to all of you.
Everyone deserves to be part of a community.
And as I grow, I’m learning to declare fewer absolutes in a complex, imperfect, and constantly changing world.