With Twitter’s impending demise I’m having some serious ideas about going full Knuth with social media, with the exception of here at micro.blog. Famously, the renowned computer scientist Donald Knuth does not use email:
I have been a happy man ever since January 1, 1990, when I no longer had an email address. I’d used email since about 1975, and it seems to me that 15 years of email is plenty for one lifetime.
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don’t have time for such study.
I’ve been around Twitter since 2008. I’ve joined Mastodon, but at the moment I don’t feel like it’ll stick for me. And the community around micro.blog is so much nicer, calmer, thoughtful. As I wrote last year, I want to spend my already time-constrained days thinking and writing. Twitter and Mastodon don’t contribute to those things.
Maybe fourteen years of social media is enough for one lifetime.