q u i t t e r four years ago when i quit social media i didn't expect anyone to come with me. i still hear from two or three of the people i used to know on the internet. i guess i was right. no one is obligated to mimic my absurd, hypocritical anstinence, but i was surprised in spite of myself at the near total radio silence. i used to talk to these people every day. back at the beginning of the year a new friend invited me to a private mastodon instance. i laughed. "no interest," i assured him. a little while later i thought the following would be funny: i asked him if it would be against the rules to set up an account and then never, ever use it. he said he'd make an exception. eight months. that's how long it took me to start posting every day. i told myself the whole point of this exercise was discovery. in my years of relative isolation after withdrawing from social media i've filled in the blanks with other, similarly less than satisfactory alternatives. dwindling rss feeds (nobody bothers to provide them, or make sure they keep working, anymore), podcasts, and youtube. the same day i started posting on my friend's private mastodon instance in earnest, most of the tumblr feeds i still follow suddenly stopped displaying <img> tags in their feeds, which makes feeds of image blogs kind of useless. this had an impact on my [casual web surfing](http://helpful.cat-v.org/Blog/2019/12/05/0/), for sure. my friend's mastodon instance requires javascript, and doesn't work in [mothra](http://plan9.stanleylieber.com/mothra/), at all. in the meantime i heard about an activitypub implementation that skips the attention mining misfeatures (no stats, no notifications, you can't even tell when someone subscribes to your feed without manually parsing server logs). honk, by ted unangst. perhaps perversely, i set up an install. the first thing i noticed is that people communicate almost exclusively through likes, boosts, and follows, none of which i can see in honk. the second thing i noticed is that instances running in "secure mode" refuse to talk to honk, so i can't even subscribe to some feeds. the third thing i noticed is that all of this stuff was once again taking up a lot of my time.
