No Accounts
Yesterday in my first post on Bear I mentioned that it was my first public post online in over a decade, and that I haven’t used social media in that time.
When I say I haven’t used social media for that long, I really mean I haven’t had accounts on anything: No Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Discord, WhatsApp, Snapchat, LinkedIn, I don't use any of it.
I did briefly look into services running on the ActivityPub or ATproto protocols like Mastodon and Bluesky, but in my view they have many of the same issues as the big platforms, and the protocols themselves have privacy concerns of their own.
People sometimes ask me why I’m not on social media, mainly when someone I meet or a co-worker asks for my Instagram. The answer is pretty simple: I take my digital privacy seriously and I view social media as a distraction from things I’d rather spend time on.
I don’t hate modern technology and I’m not living off the grid in a log cabin (as appealing as that sounds sometimes). I work with tech, read blogs and forums, tutorials to learn new code and watch videos (either using NewPipe or an alternative YouTube frontend like Invidious).
I think the reason it took me so long to actually post on Bear is that for the last decade I've been reading, watching, and learning without ever posting anything.
I still don't have any plan, but I'm curious to see what happens if I keep posting.