My idea of “twitter minimalism” is to use a third-party app or client, Tweetbot in my case. The idea is, because of Tweetbot’s “lack of features” would somehow minimize some of the issues I have with Twitter, in this case. Let me explain. Yes, Tweetbot still manages to have push notifications, but only for mentions and DM’s, I am not a very popular person so I don’t get many notifications. But I feel like I am also been a little bit of a hypocrite by having the official Twitter app installed, in a folder but still. In the back of my head, I feel like I still need some kind of validation on my posts (my posts are mostly cross-posts from Micro.blog). Like, did my post got retweeted or did anybody liked it or at least saw it? That sort of thing. On top of that, I get all these other notifications like “so and so liked this tweet, look look!”, “Someone posted this thing you need to look at it!!!”, etc, etc.
This is probably something I have been having a hard time breaking away from, that sense of “I need some kind of validation” or “I can’t miss a thing!”. When I had my blog on Wordpress, I found myself obsessing over analytics, “How many people visited”, “How many people read my thing” or “Is anyone following me?”, this is something Micro.blog helped me break away from. And still, every once in awhile I would write a post and don’t see any feedback or comments and for two seconds I fret a bit, it doesn’t last long though, it leaves my mind pretty quickly and I remember I am writing mostly for myself.
Instagram is another one. I post a picture, in my mind the picture is good but it doesn’t get many likes and I get a wee bit anxious. Or I ask myself “Why I ain’t got more followers?”. I don’t think so much about these things nowadays, as much, but I did for a long time.
It’s a little hard to break away from all this indoctrination that we have gotten from these big social-media silos, the need for some sort of validation. Leaving apps or services that seem to be geared towards this type of practice has helped. Starting by moving away from Wordpress and Facebook, for example. Maybe I need to move away from Instagram (again) or just simply minimize my use of it. For twitter, well, I can either quit it (which probably won’t happen anytime soon) or delete the official app and stop thinking about the retweets, the likes and all the other notifications I shouldn’t care about.
I know this particular topic has been beaten to death but this is the first time I’m putting my thoughts out there. And I was bored and for some reason started thinking about it. :D
