I'm taking a break from the fediverse.

For some of you, this might not be all that surprising. My Fediverse activity has been declining as of recently. Outside of my announcement for Indexing Your Heart's new prototype, I haven't been posting as much, if at all, on my Mastodon account (@me@cafe.marquiskurt.net). Development has stalled on Fedigardens, my relationship with the Fediverse being one of those reasons.

When I joined the Fediverse back in 2018, it was still a niche platform that didn't quite reach the mainstream. Everyone else was on Twitter, and my Mastodon feed didn't have any big names in it. But man, did I enjoy it then; people were just posting cool stuff. Projects they're working on, blog posts about protocols and other fun gizmos, dumb little jokes that made no sense whatsoever, you name it. Social media had felt fun again.

The Fediverse landscape has changed significantly since then. The unscrupulous and braindead decisions from those running Twitter (err, sorry, "X", for you pedantic little prescriptivists) led to a mass exodus of the platform and a large entry into the Fediverse. The Fediverse started becoming more mainstream, which I was completely okay with, despite the technology not being up to par with what most folks were used to.

But, over time, my Mastodon feed changed significantly. The posts that I once saw of cool projects, dumb jokes, stunning photography, and the like started showing up less and less. Instead, I get a barrage of "Apple bad", "Trump did something stupid again", "X service bad for the Fediverse", "daily reminder climate change is real and bad", and all sorts of other types of content.

Climate change is a very real problem that needs to be addressed. Having Trump again as president of the United States is extremely dangerous. You're frustrated with Apple because they don't let you do whatever you want with your devices. You all hate Big Tech. Most people don't like AI because nothing seems to have been done to address ethical and environmental concerns. The genocide of Palestinian people is still happening, and the US doesn't seem content to stop it. I get it. But surely, I don't need to be reminded of such things every single minute of every single hour?

Rather than a place of cool people posting cool shit, my social media feed has become an echo chamber of the same types of content, over and over. And every time I look at my Mastodon feed, I'm filled with a sense of dread. When I go to post something cool and fun, whether it be something I'm working on or something cool I found, it feels like I'm walking into something where my content is easily ignored.

I don't want to stop anyone from posting whatever they want on their accounts; it's within everyone's right to curate and post the content they want to engage with on social media. Likewise, I'm in desperate need of curating my feed as well if this blog post is anything to go by. But curation is hard, and I have such a high follower count that it'll take quite some time to get through it all. Mastodon filters don't work for me because you can't encode linguistic semantics into a naive string search, either.

So, my best option right now is to just stop and take a break from the Fediverse. As much as it pains me to walk away from a social media network I've been a participant of for six or so years, it's something I need to do desperately.

I might still post content through Indexing Your Heart's account whenever a new prototype release is out, but until I can find it within myself to start anew and curate my feed, this is goodbye, for now.