In a move that someone will insist on calling truly hipster, I deleted
my microphlog today.

This may seem to be in the wake of what was apparently a failed mass
exodus from Twitter[1], but I actually deleted my microphlog because I
don't like microphlogging (you probably could have guessed that[2]). I
found that the self-imposed character limit was, well, limiting me.
Instead of engaging in (or commencing) some real discourse, I was
throwing small thoughts into the void, much like how you'd throw small
objects at a cat. (I've never actually done that.)

I don't like microblogging for the same reason I feel the phlogosphere
(not just at SDF, but the set of all phlogs) is good without the
facility for comments. As many have suggested ([3] and the entries
referenced there), writing your own phlog entry in response to another's
leads to higher-quality, deeper interaction than responding on a comment
thread would.

Short utterances make sense when you're having a conversation, but not
so much when you're engaging in thoughtful dialogue with multiple
parties, in a public or group forum, and across time.

I think the effort involved in writing a phlog entry[4] is good, as it
provides a form of positive barrier to entry. This is similar to the
barrier to entry formed by keeping Gopher separate from the Web[5]: The
network of Gopher holes and tunnels can grow and can be discovered,
without getting flooded. This stance seems to have general support
across Gopher:

In an email, leveck writes:
> I whole-heartedly want gopherspace to be seperate from the www without
> keeping people from finding it and bringing their new ideas with them.

The barrier to entry of writing an individual phlog entry is a bit
different because it applies not to new people joining a community, but
to me, and, like me, other phlog authors, each time we write and
publish. It, then, forms a threshold which my ideas must cross to enter
the public (or semi-public) sphere: The hope is that only the good ones
make it, and those that do get the effort put into them.

Now I don't feel that Gopher should have a barrier to entry is the sense
of autocratic control of who can enter, the type for which psztrnk
criticises Counter.social[1]. At the moment, this isn't the case,
and it would be challenging to institute. While it takes a little more
effort to write a phlog entry, Gopher is perhaps one of the easiest
forms of Internet-based content distribution to self-host, curtailing
the control any one party can have over the medium.

Let's talk about the birdsite. It rings alarm-bells that the name
Twitter itself has become a demon-word. 

I've never used Twitter and don't particularly care to. It's not
something that would help me keep in touch with my friends (there's
other technology which does, which is cool) and I'd feel creepy
following strangers around. If I want to read something, I want it to
last longer than a sip of coffee.

It's a concern when you need a special day (and a special hashtag at
that) to leave something. I can get it for big lifestyle changes, like
becoming vegan #veganuary #hashtag #onlyironically but ceasing to use
the services of a particular company (i.e., Twitter) shouldn't fall into
this category.

I've been meaning to cut down on caffeine, but I haven't. Caffeine is
dependency-forming, and so it's hard. If I'd been meaning to leave
Twitter, but didn't (like the people who were meaning to leave this
year, but didn't), I would take it as a sign I had a Twitter dependency.

Mastodon is the new black, or something. I don't know if it's all that
great. In theory, it's better than Twitter, and I think that being
federated, non-commercial, and ad-free are good, high ideals.

I understand federation, but I get the impression that the Web-at-large
doesn't. Federation is both technological and ideological.
Technologically, it's a means for services that share a protocol but are
run by different parties to communicate with each other. This is good.
It happens a lot, and is usually unnoticed, like with email or phones.
In terms of ideology, federation is about users being spread across
independent but interconnected instances with the aim of demonstrating
that any one instance has limited control over the network as a whole. I
don't know how much this is happening; I get the impression that users
are crowding onto a small number of instances like mastodon.social and
counter.social.

It's actually hard to tell what Mastodon is like from the outside. It's
pretty closed--it's another walled garden. This could swing either
way[6]. What impression I do get of the content is that it's not that
different to Twitter. I don't really care if sausages are the best thing
for lunch, or what object it is that your cat's underneath today, or that
you're going to re-tooweet Donald Trump. I also don't care that "food"
or "I" or "TOOT" or "KORG". It's just another microblogging platform.
Perhaps a better, healthier one, but still a vacuous one. It's like
environmentally friendly farts.

[1] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/psztrnk/log/20180103.txt
[2] gopher://tellus.strangled.net/0/phlog/i-dont-like-microblogging
[3] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/jynx/dat/20171230.post
[4] gopher://grex.org/0/~papa/pgphlog/2017/ac7-tfurrows_s_8088
[5] gopher://tellus.strangled.net/0/grex/notes-on-robots.txt
[6] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/more-on-walled-gardens.txt