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Analog January: The No Twitter Challenge

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Cal Newport, who was featured multiple times on this blog already, recently wrote an article on leaving social media at least for a month: Analog January: The No Twitter Challenge.

While he's following a strict no-social-media policy in his work, it reminded me of my Twitter Lent from 2017 where I was not using Twitter for forty days. It was OK but it had no major impact on my daily life back then.

Meanwhile, I'm using Mastodon as my main social media account and sync to my Twitter account (see my about-page for links).

This time, Cal's challenge aims for one month:

Do not access Twitter for the month of January. In its place, learn a new non-professional skill or pursue a hobby project for no other reason than inherent enjoyment. When you feel the need to check Twitter, work on this initiative instead.
A guy holding up large posters while standing on his window, watching people with binoculars.
Non Sequitur on old-school social-media (Source: [[https://wpcomics.washingtonpost.com/client/wpc/nq/2022/01/06/][Washington Post]]).

My Current Social Media World

Time to check my personal addiction level again. When I wake up, I consume social media for at least fifteen minutes. Before I sleep the same. During the day, I'm reading my feeds a couple of times. I read all of my both social media streams, not just going through it with only reading a few posts. This way, I end up with more or less thirty minutes of Mastodon and Twitter, not including reading the links or watching linked videos.

In contrast to the dangers described by Cal Newport, I do think that I don't rely on Twitter as a way to get confirmation or a higher social status. I may be wrong, of course.

Social media is not my only source of information. I actually prefer Atom/RSS feeds and currently read 115 feeds through my feed aggregator Android app. This won't stop in January since I rely on following the world somehow. Furthermore, I do read a weekly paper magazine on politics and general topics.

What My Social Media Followers Think

I made a brief survey on my Mastodon account because I was curious on how my followers think about me posting nothing for a month. The result was a surprise to me:

Result was 67% yes, 0% no, 33% I don't care with 12 participants.
Mastodon survey: "Should I stop using Twitter and Mastodon for Jannuary 2022 [...]?"

Two thirds of the twelve people who participated encouraged me to avoid social media for January. None objected and one third did not care.

Nobody tried to convince me to continue posting on social media for January.

Technical Implementation

I asked for suggestions on how I'm able to lock away social media apps without losing my configuration settings. It seems to be the case that I only can disable notifications and maybe use some parental control apps which do require too many permissions for my purpose. Some other simple lock apps want full network access which is dubious to me. And I got tired of using NetGuard to control dubious apps that want network access without any particular reason.

Android is able to freeze built-in apps but not third-party apps.

So I probably may purge my Mastodon and Twitter apps, losing all the settings. Another disappointment of Android in recent time where Google does not seem to support the user. (I might write about those things in one of my upcoming articles.)

My Forecast

Maybe I'm going to blog more postings and blog shorter postings on this blog instead of sharing via social media. This resonates well with my goal to replace social media with my blog. The main reason why I could not follow this approach so far is, that people do seem to have forgotten how great Atom/RSS-feeds are. It's so much better to follow to external content. No secret algorithm that generates my news feed, less fallacy of generating a more or less great online reputation, decentralized solution, my own choice for the unified reading interface experience, no advertisements.

In February, I will write about my experience.

If you want to follow my updates in January, you should read how to follow one of my blog update feeds.


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