I have been complaining about social media for at least 7 years, maybe more. I don’t like the way it captures my attention, the way it sucks me in, the way it kills my mood and makes me distrustful of people.

Yesterday I saw a positive post about a thing currently in the zeitgeist, and whose viewpoint I agreed with. My response was not to share it or comment on it, but instead I went to the comments because I wanted to see what the horrible people would say about it. I was looking to be outraged, to find people to whom I felt myself to be morally superior.

I do not like this version of myself. I don’t like me on social media.

I like Facebook (for example) best as a place to put thoughts like the 3 paragraphs above. It’s important to me that people read these thoughts - I get no value from putting them in a private journal. I have been blogging since 2003 - I am used to writing in public. I like the accountability that comes from being a public person.

But I do not like the spambots and the trolls, the debt I feel when I get lots of comments, or god almighty, the notifications. And it pisses me off that people who I find deplorable and whose worldview I do not share use my words to make money.

Fine, people say. You have a blog - use it.

Fair, fair. But while I have been using WordPress for almost 16 years now, the last 6 or so of those has been a struggle. It does so much now, to try to be so much to so many people, that it does nothing particularly well, and it brings with it so much friction and is so busy that it overwhelms my ADHD brain. Writing a blog post used to be quick and easy. Now it’s such a production.

And somewhere along the way, we began to write for algorithms, instead of writing for readers. So many words per paragraph, images, keywords, tags, and categories. Along the way, we abandoned things like point of view and voice.

So, I’m trying a new thing - a new, from scratch, blog. I’m not going to import my back catalog - although it will remain on the internet at blog.hughhollowell.org. I’m using micro.blog as the platform to make things easy and clean, albeit a bit expensive for what you get.

When I’m done in a week or so setting it up, it will import automatically to Mastodon and Threads and BlueSky for folks who want to follow that way, and there will be an RSS feed. I will be hosting it at my oldest URL I currently own, hughlh.com.

It’s an experiment. Let’s give it a month or so and see if I still like it. But so far, I like it a lot.

I’m not really into technology, but I follow and read a lot of technology folks.

H’mmm, that’s not quite right. I obviously use tech - like I am right now! - but I don’t really care how it works. I’m sort of like the guy who drives a hi-performance car, but has no desire to actually understand how fuel injectors actually work. I can change the oil and know to rotate the tires, but have no desire to actually build my own car.

So, anyway, I read and follow Ben Werdmuller, who leads technology at ProPublica. And I loved his recent post on what the tech-bros love to call “Lifestyle Design”.

In it, he talks about what he wants out of life, and by extension, what he thinks should be made available to everyone. It’s not just the sort of life he wants, but the sort of world he wants to live in. It sounds like a great place.

But he hit on something that has given me fits for the two decades I have been working for social change.

My values are simply that everyone should be able to live this sort of life, regardless of who they are or where in the world they live. Everyone deserves autonomy, connection, support, safety, and the freedom to be themselves and express themselves openly. It’s not just that I want this for me, although clearly I do: I want to work towards this being an open, shared set of living principles that are available to all.

I’ve thought a lot about helping the world get there — remember, I want to work on projects with the potential to make the world more informed and equal. But the path to helping me get there is a little different. It involves carefully choosing the projects I work on, the team cultures I take part in, how I make money, how I present myself to the world, and the people and communities I associate with.

That part in the second paragraph about the difference between helping the world get there, and you getting there. That part right there.

I spent years sacrificing my housing arrangements so that others could have adequate housing. Years sacrificing my health so others could have adequate healthcare. Years turning down things that would benefit my family so that I could work to make other people’s families safer.

I’m no longer willing to do that.

I’m deeply committed to a better world for everyone. And it still occupies my thoughts, my work, and my plans. But I no longer believe that it requires I set myself on fire to keep others warm.

I like learning new things. It’s sort of my toxic trait - I would rather learn something new than master the existing thing I know. It’s probably ADHD-related - God knows everything else in my chaos-Muppet existence is.

Like, last night I came across a video of someone silver-soldering a ring, and ended up in a rabbit hole on YouTube watching folks make jewlery, and now maybe I want to learn how to do that?

So anyway, one cool thing about shifting to micro.blog is that I have to learn new skills - like writing in Markdown.

Over the holidays, I saw several examples of people over 50 not knowing how to do something that involved technology (like, how to change contact info on a phone) and them asking a younger person to do it for them. NOT to teach them how, but to do it for them.

I never want to be that person. I love learning things. I hope I always will. My biggest fear is to be the person that refuses to learn.

I have been on social media since the early days. I have been blogging since 2003.

I have friends from all around the world because of social media. I have raised several million dollars for good causes because of social media. My livelihood, my relationships, and so much enjoyment I get from my life is because of social media.

But I’m tired of social media. Or, rather, I’m tired of the ways the social media companies manipulate us. I want to meet cool people - I have no desire to participate in what Tobias Rose-Stockwell calls an outrage machine.

So I’m going to try something new.