Deciding what belongs on my website

Twitter is the only thing that’s ever made me feel addicted. The combination is my catnip: learning interesting things, seeing pretty art, following live events as they unfold (especially ones that seem poorly covered by the news), venting about politics, and pumping up my emotions.
I fought back against my Twitter addiction by hard blocking the domain, which worked reasonably well for several years. Except I wasn’t really free of it, because I managed a Twitter account for work. So I was still on Twitter multiple days a week, and writing tweets. Even when I got some colleagues to pitch in shifts on managing Facebook, I was always solely responsible for Twitter. Then when the pandemic hit and I switched to remote work, I had to unblock the domain on my computer so I could access my work Twitter account. I resisted posting and engaging on my personal Twitter account, but reading alone is enough to rile me up.
Now that I have quit my job, for the first time in nearly eight years I truly have a choice about whether to use Twitter.
I agree with Ben Werd: “I’m afraid of leaving Twitter for two reasons: because I might miss something from someone, and because someone might miss something from me. In other words, I feel like I need to be on the platform to stay informed for the good of myself, and to let people know about the work I’m doing for the good of my career.”

The FOMO of Twitter is real and legitimate; I have learned so much I wouldn’t have without it. I’ve learned tons about ableism and accessibility from following disability advocates. I’ve gotten better updates about COVID directly from scientists and public health experts. These are clear benefits to my life.
But this is the trap: the grain of real value floating in a toxic sea. “I won’t stay in that long — the acid won’t hurt that bad in a quick dip,” you tell yourself.
It will.
It eats away at your emotions and thought patterns, etching itself deeper with every dip.
For me, the site brings more negativity than optimism, feeding my cynical and pessimistic tendencies. For as much as I learn about ableism, I rage about injustices out of my control.
And a lot of what I learn from Twitter *feels* important, but instead feeds a cycle of despair and disempowerment. Book industry updates. News about Iran and Ukraine and Russia. Political decisions and rulings. Book bans. Shootings. Hate crimes.
Do I really need to hear about every horrible event across the United States, the world? Must I bear witness to and the emotional burden of every act of terror, of racism, of injustice?
‘Privilege’ is levied as if it is my moral obligation to join the suffering, when my suffering does nothing to help or lessen others’, it just adds to the pool of misery.
And The Discourse feels like the public conversation you need to be part of to be relevant, to be part of whatever industry or group is tearing itself apart on any given day. But it’s usually about somebody’s fuckup. And the personal nature of the attacks — Twitter famously has the daily Main Character you Do Not Want To Be — is almost always disproportionate to the error. Death threats, getting people fired, cancelling new authors’ debuts.
It’s especially galling when someone’s life is torn apart based on a misunderstanding or Having A Bad Opinion. But no one dares push back on this vengeful cycle for fear of drawing the Furies’ wrath upon themselves. I’m not crying Cancel Culture, but there is a difference between holding accountable people in positions of power and authority, and destroying a normal person’s life for one mistake, potentially taken out of context. As Timothy Snyder wrote in On Tyranny, “No one has a private life that can survive public exposure by hostile directive.” People are not perfect, and it feels ironic that it’s often the group advocating against prison that wants to mete out punishment. If we believe in second chances, shouldn’t that also apply to people who have done something non-criminal as well?
Part of me wonders if I’ve done this to myself by following people who post about this. If I’m rubbernecking and enjoy it more than I want to admit. If there could be a way to get the good of Twitter without the bad — but I think that’s a question born of addictive mindset and denial.
Because it’s also an illusion that Twitter will help you. That you must be there for the sake of your career. I have seen very little engagement with my work on Twitter. Maybe I’m bad at self promotion. Maybe my work sucks. Maybe I have no followers interested in my actual work. But the perception that Twitter will help my career is, for me at least, a meager justification for staying on a toxic platform.
I must give channels of self-promotion due consideration as I pivot to freelance work — yet for the type of services I offer and my target audience, Twitter is an unlikely place for me to connect with potential clients. For my blogging and other creative work, there are other barriers to people engaging with my work that I could put my attention to first, like publishing more consistently, writing more meaningful titles, and investing more time in editing. Pretending Twitter is the answer to gaining respect for and engagement with my work is an addict’s excuse that removes responsibility from myself.

Liked What are your [#indieweb] dreams for the web? by Sara Jakša (sarajaksa.eu)

I remember on the university, when we were told all the time, to make sure to never post anything compromising on the internet. Compromising was meant as anything that any employer in the future could use against you.
Some of the obvious ones were pictures of taking drugs or pictures of partying and excessive drinking. But if you listened carefully, they also warned about posting anything, they would not agree with. So I guess no anti-capitalistic posts? Or long art retreats? Or posts about alternative living situations?
On the end, what they wanted it for us to control our online image.
I mean, I still have some traces of this. Will people judge me if I squeal about my favourite manga, anime or books? Can I post some badly research historical notes for myself? Can I rant about my personal problems?

Love Sara’s point here about considering what is compromising and especially from whose perspective — as a recovering perfectionist and an oddball I still struggle with this. Will I turn off potential clients by ranting about AI or climate change or abortion on my personal website? Can I speak politically, safely? Will I not be taken seriously for writing reviews of romance novels and proudly displaying their covers on my reading page? I haven’t yet posted my consulting website on LinkedIn because I’m embarrassed by its simplicity — even though I intentionally made the one-page website as a starter because something would be better than nothing — will I hurt my professional reputation as a designer by sharing a plain website?
Putting things in writing where anyone can see them carries an element of risk in so many domains. There are some topics I simply won’t allow myself to post about for safety reasons, but otherwise am pretty opinionated and wide ranging in this blog. Bit by bit, I’ve been incorporating and consolidating more of my identity onto this website. It’s in part a rejection of packaging myself into a personal brand, of condensing my interests to a “coherent” palette, of prioritizing others’ ability to categorize me over my own self-expression.

Which is why for me, it is 100-times easier to comment on a fanfiction story, then it is on the blog post. Also, it is not at all weird to go through all the stories a certain person had written and comment on their all. Going through the person’s blog posts? That actually feels weird.

😂 I’m glad I’m not the only one who isn’t 100% sure on modern blog commenting etiquette, and who feels weird sometimes reading others’ blog archives. I still carry latent worries about making a social faux pas and vulnerability from being a kid who didn’t fit in and didn’t read social cues well. (I’m glad I can now recognize these patterns in myself but wish it wasn’t quite so much work to reroute those synaptic pathways!)
I still haven’t posted my full blogroll, omitting anyone’s site who feels like just another normal person who I haven’t met and talked with multiple times — I feel awkward to be seen following strangers’ blogs, even though I’m doing the same thing and writing in public 😅🤷‍♀️ There are 89 RSS feeds in my “people” folder, but I’ve probably only included a handful on my blogroll. (And that’s ignoring everyone I follow on micro.blog, since I read them on site not in RSS.)
Social media sets the expectation that you’re meant to be following people, and for others to follow you, though each platform has different norms; it felt weird to follow randos who weren’t essentially “businesses” on FB and Instagram, but practically expected on Twitter. I’m curious how others feel about the norms of social commentary and following on the IndieWeb? Even this post is a bit awkward from a post kind perspective, because I’m not really replying to Sara, but I’m also not not? I’ve settled on posting this as a like because I feel a reply post ought to be direct when it’s to another personal website.