During my morning coffee with Claude today I asked if I was missing something, anything, by shunning all forms of social media, except blogging of course. A little back story, I adopted Twitter when it was first available (2006) and lived through those early years of the whale fails and short ‘blogging’ as Twitter evolved into something worthwhile. Then I was part of the great exodus when Musk ruined it (2022) and have never looked back.

Facebook has never been on my radar, in fact, I automatically deduct 40 IQ points from anyone when I learn they have a FB account.

(It’s my own prejudice, don’t take it personally).

Wondering if I might be missing something, I solicited a second opinion on my lack of social media involvement. After explaining my situation to the AI, it offered this case for staying mostly off social media:

“Amateur radio already has a strong, self-contained community. People who want to find content about it know where to look — they search, they find blogs, they use forums like QRZ.com, eHam, and Reddit’s r/amateurradio. You’re not trying to drive product sales or build a monetizable audience, so the typical reasons bloggers chase social media followers don’t really apply to you. Without something to sell, social media becomes a treadmill of posting and engagement that doesn’t reward you with anything tangible.”

“The big platforms — Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram — are also increasingly noisy, algorithm-driven, and frankly unpleasant to use. For a hobby blog, the juice is rarely worth the squeeze”.

Full disclosure, I maintain a mostly dormant Mastodon account with almost no engagement or followers. Claude seemed to think I might enjoy engaging with that crowd and offered this:

The one exception worth thinking about: your Mastodon account

“The amateur radio community has a surprisingly active and healthy presence on Mastodon, particularly on ham-specific instances like mastodon.radio. Unlike the big platforms, it’s low-noise, low-drama, and the people there are genuinely interested in the hobby. A simple practice of posting a short note and link when you publish something new takes maybe two minutes and puts your content in front of people who actually want to read it — without any algorithm games or ad pressure.”

“If you’re going to do anything, dusting off that Mastodon account (or migrating to mastodon.radio if you’re not already there) is the one I’d suggest. It fits the culture of both amateur radio and Jekyll-style indie blogging pretty well.”

I find this all to be solid advice for me, though my level of interest in Mastodon may be too small for full engagement. For now, the blog remains the focus and Mastodon stays on the back burner.