1. 2017-12-30

    I'm sick of Twitter, folks. I've decided to do something both mild and drastic about it. For 2018, I have resolved to stop using it.

    I am not sure what it is for anymore, it certainly doesn't feel like it is for me. I think I've been disengaging slowly for the last couple of years, and in 2017 I repeatedly found it too aggravating, and depressing to engage with. I think I would have already ragequit, had one of last year's resolutions not been that silly selfie thing. Thus a seed was planted about resolutions and exits. Brains often work that way. (Referendums are silly though)

    I was late to twitter. I downloaded my twitter archive, whilst I was scraping out all of the 2017 selfies, and apparently my first tweet is from Dec 2007.

    I was late to Battlestar Galactica as well.

    I probably spent a little while reading twitter before registering, although I don't remember anything specific. I can't remember why I signed up in the first place. Looking at that first month of odd, stilted entirely quotidian status posts, I can tell I'm working on Logical Bee, mostly alone, babysitting that dog. It's winter. Maybe I'm lonely? I have a dim memory of thinking it was pretty dumb for a long while before getting involved at all. I remember fiddling about connecting it to things, and experimenting with SMS tweets and emails. I don't think it really clicked for the longest while. I remember a sense of a clique I wasn't ever going to be able to get into. That first wave of web-natives, younger than my generation. More entuned to a web of application services and APIs than hypertexts and data servers. I remember tweetups being a thing, and a Bristol one being announced, and spending an hour or two before deciding firmly I wasn't the kind of person that went to that kind of thing. I quite wish I had gone now. I didn't used to be a very good joiner-in of things. I'm not much better at that now. A little bit, perhaps. Now I know to try.

    It took the longest while, but eventually it clicked. I liked the lightness of it. It was sort-of social networking, but social networking at arms length. Lots of irony, lots of whimsy. I just remembered the earliest phase of my binning Facebook was to convert my facebook to just echo my tweets back into it, for the muggles to read. I remember being very snobby and standoffish about things like hashtags and @replies. My first reply wasn't until August 2008.

    To Daveh! Either I don't know how to reply yet, or the Twitter archive has incorrectly threaded that reply back together. Either seems plausible.

    I didn't use a hashtag until May 2009. Even then I was repurposing "get off my lawn" meta-commentary. Amused to see that my next half dozen hashtags are complaining about moonfruit's use of them for viral marketing. Many years later I ended up working there for a season. Again we see the seeds are sown, and the fruit is reaped.

    Not too ashamed of that one. It's interesting looking back at tweets like that, I have a sense that the prevailing vibe of Twitter at the time was that the cool kids were beating out the idiots. I don't get that vibe off Twitter now.

    By this point it was clearly very firmly entrenched in my daily desktop routine. Once I got hold of smartphones that could run twitter, I think my usage ramped up. I remember by the time I got to last.fm, I was tweeting all the things, curating a couple of hashtags (#fantasypeelsessions for serendipitous word groups that sounded like band names, #fisharecool for cool fish facts), running multiple joke twitter accounts, writing bots, and generally really enjoying it. I remember when I got to Makeshift, and twitter seemed to be used as the wiring behind at least half of everything there, it then seemed like a necessary internet plumbing for web apps. With hindsight I think that was the peak. It was downhill from there. I don't like it any more, I have detected an opportune moment, and I have decided to leave. At least for one year.

    I'm not going to use this post for arguing about why I think it's broken. One of the largest problems I have with it is the sheer concentration of negativity. And one of the reasons I want to move away from it is to focus on building things that are more positive. It's not just Twitter. I'm pretty broken-hearted with the state of the web in 2017 - it's very far from what I signed on to help build as one of those idealistic Gen X web 1.0 types. And again, rather than just bemoan that, I'd rather start focusing on ways to think about fixing that. And for me, in 2018, this means I'm going to go small, and focus on building things and content I can own, in the sidelines. I expect I will be updating here more. I plan to double-down a bit harder on indieweb things, and federated stuff. POSSE all the things. Death to silos. I've been experimenting with micro.blogs and mastodon.social, and I want to play more with beaker and dat, and blockstack and IPFS and other idealistic p2p proto-webs. Maybe even frogans?. The real web looks more like that. Maybe I can help figure out how to make it a bit easier for everyone to clamber onboard.

    "But CMS, I think we're Twitter-friends, what does this mean for US?"

    First off, that's flattering, almost-certainly-entirely-imaginary-cms-fan, thanks! I like you too! Occasionally some of my tweets get as many as five or six engagements, and I do enjoy keeping up with some lovely people. Some of whom I met or perhaps only know through twitter. I'm sorry if this feels like a breakup; It's not you, it's me, as they say in the rom-coms. (Actually, I'm not dumping anyone.)

    Something else I want to push for in 2018 is better quality, stronger, social engagement. I want to cultivate more real contact, more high bandwidth engagement and connection with all the good people. This can work two ways of course. If you only really interact with me on a tweet by tweet basis, and you think you're going to miss that, then do please reach out. We can have coffee, or get beers, or just go fish in a lake or something else entirely. And I'm going to be pushing myself to reach out to more people in turn myself, something I'm astronomically poor at. Please help me with this if you can!

    IRL networking I plan to ramp up a bit. More meetups, tech and maybe otherwise. Maybe I'll rescind my conference ban. Maybe I'll start some of these things, or start helping to organise them more.

    I'm not doing an *infocide*. As well as publishing things hanging from here, which has plenty of RSS feeds, if you can still figure out how to integrate those into your workflows then I'll probably never be very far away. Also, if you look at the home page, there's a list of dozens of other not-Twitter platforms you can stalk me on or connect to me via (maybe we are already!) - If my plan comes together, I hope to be syndicating and updating the useful ones of these more actively.

    I don't intend to delete or remove my twitter account, and I will set things up so I still get notifications, so nobody gets ignored. I might even automate some notifications to my twitter feed about updates to things elsewhere. I'm just not going to be participating as a human. I expect I will remove all the apps, so my turnaround on mentions might slow right down.

    If you're in the select category of people who only know how to contact me with twitter, there are many options. I haven't changed my phone number, should you know me well enough to have one of those. If you're looking for a way to DM to me, I cannot endorse keybase strongly enough. I think they're trying to do something really interesting, and could do with some more network effect. Sign up to keybase, and keybase message me, I love getting keybase messages, and I always respond. Invite me to your keybase groups! Also, please share your slacks and your newsletters and your mailing lists with me, if you think I'd like them, or they'd like me.

    Email still works, and I still read it. My address is even on my website.

    Finally, if you're reading this, and we've Twitter interacted in some way, let me say a goodbye for now. If I was annoying, or argumentative, I'm sorry, I can be hard work soemtimes. Maybe some of that might have been caused by the platform? If I was fun or charming or interesting, then let's work to stay in touch! If you don't really care, you're not even sure how you got here from off of twitter, that's cool too, maybe I'll see you again in a year from now.

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  2. 2017-12-24

    In 2017 I decided to take, and tweet, a selfie at every single standup meeting I attended. Here they all are.

    It started out as a bit of a joke, at the start of the year documenting the fact that I was the only member of the, by then rapidly dwindling, LMN platform team at work for the first weeks. When I thought about it a little bit more I decided it might make a nice new year's resolution to add to the 2017 set. I'm a relentless, quixotic, self-improver, and I decided a selfie at every standup might make an interesting project.

    I really don't like having my photograph taken. I wondered if making myself do it enough might work as a half-assed form of exposure therapy. As a professional software developer in 2017, I could expect to be attending at least one standup/scrum meet a day. By the end of the year, I might be not so uncomfortable standing in front of a camera.

    A couple of rules. Every standup meet, even if there were multiple in a day. First shot, no matter how terrible. Immediately to twitter with it, no editing, filters, or multiple shots.

    By and large I think it worked. It's quite interesting looking back at them all now, a year later. Although I didn't plan it this way, I ended up switching jobs twice in 2017, so there's a document of me shifting out and in of three different roles and teams. It's interesting for me, reading my facial expression and mapping that onto how well or badly I know the meetings to be going at that point of time. So much hair, so little outfit variety. Originally, I was snapping quite a few of them on my XPS 13 webcam, because there was a lot of remoting in through Google Hangouts at Wonderbly, but eventually they're all WileyFox Swift2 and eventually 2X with maybe a couple of Jolla C shots

    You can see me losing interest somewhat in the device as time pans out - they start out with lots of experimentation of poses and framing and composition, but the second half of the year it's mostly routinely, quick-snapped head-shots. This isn't helped by the fact that the offices got a little bit duller. Synthace might be set within a literal vetinary hostpital, with all kinds of attendant freakish wonders, but for the entirety of my short tenure we were camped out in a very tight spot, with the standups awkwardly crammed into a tiny meeting room, or taken on the balcony.

    There's a few cameos, which are probably my favourite bits. @tomcartwrightuk is there, as is @dankitchen_uk, and there's a @paulcuth photobomb. And the ancient dog gets into one. I'm glad he's in there. I haven't written about the dog yet, and I need to soon.

    How well did it work? A bit. I don't flinch or freak out about how to act in front of a camera quite so much as I used to. I occasionally snap a selfie just for the heck of it. I accidentally ended up at the front of the Zego group shot that ended up going out with the press kit, and spent a day fielding queries from friends wondering why I was featured so heavily on techcrunch. I still don't enjoy looking at myself in photos, but I think I've started to engage with that more constructively. As resolutions go, I think I won this one.

    posted by cms on
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