I am clean and free of twitter for one week, and it feels great! Of course, I have replaced it with something that solves some of the issues, but not all, and that is mastodon. Its got a bunch of nice features, one of which is the ability to make semi-private accounts. You can have some of your posts public, and some private, and only your followers will see your private things. This is great!

However, it means that people you don’t want to see you private things have no mechanism to follow only your public stuff. Most people have been solving this with maintaining two seperate accounts, which is a totally fine approach. I decided to automate it, and give people the ability to follow just my public posts. The way that I am doing that is by using a public account that automatically boosts posts from the private account if they fit a certain set of filters.

I set the whole thing up on glitch.com, and you can easily https://glitch.com/edit/#!/autoboost if you would like.

additional notes

I think mastodon is great - no ads, no algorythmic remixing of posts to drive engagement, ability to run your own server with you own rules. The api and tools that are set up for making bots on it are great as well. I really want spin up some bots that I took off of twitter on mastodon just because it would be easy.

However, I wonder if the underlying social space that it is creating is fundamentally flawed. Twitter has all of these problems, and it grew into them partially organically, and partially directed by the interests of the platform. Twitter encouraged me to perform on it in a way that I didn’t love, because I had some extremely visible numbers that would go up and down in realtime in response to what I did there. The way that it feel like a chat room (many to many, mostly equal social standing in discussions), but simultanously a blog (one to many, with a section for the public to respond) is a weird way to think about discussions. I am curious to see how this makes me feel, now that I have a partially private account.

I am hoping that it will land for me somewhere like the semi private forums that I was involved with in the late 90s / early 2ks, where I could have drop in conversations with friends. I think it can - just framing it correctly in my own mind is a big part of it.