These days I am restricting most of my social media stuff to Mastodon, and lately I’ve started doing non-posts. They go like this:
- See an interesting post from someone I follow, or someone whose post has been boosted by someone I follow.
- Start writing a reply to the post.
- Question whether the reply adds anything of value.
- Exit out of the reply, opting not to post it.
- Repeat Steps 1-4.
Why do I do this? I’m not entirely sure, but I think it’s related to this latent fear of saying the wrong thing, somehow, of offending or coming across as weird or odd. I am a fairly shy person in face-to-face interactions, and I think this might be the online equivalent to that. I just prefer to watch others talk. Or type, in this case.
Proving this, I was originally going to make this a post on Mastodon, then changed my mind and posted it here instead.
