“What I’m trying to protect now is presence. The ability to have an experience without immediately narrativizing it for an audience. To feel what I feel without calculating how it would perform. To say “this isn’t for public consumption” and mean it. To have a self that exists outside of how it’s perceived.”

The cost of turning your life into... See more

And yet: as much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I... See more

“I didn’t want to reject the digital world entirely; I just wanted to stop being consumed by it.”