I've stopped posting to social media. Mostly I was posting photographs. I realized that those posts were creating a lot of noise in my head—in terms of echoes of emotion and conversation. It is too much and of a certain kind that I decided to stop posting. I have decided this before about social media and gone back on it. I hope this time is the last. I find most social media people to be shallowly interested. I find the alt text debate on Mastodon tiring. So for now I've removed my social media links from this site and I've stopped posting on social media
Update (three weeks later): I deleted my Mastodon account today—2,000 followers, abandoned. As I thought about things, there was one particular alt text story that stuck in my side. A millionaire, a known millionaire, giving me pedantic advice about how to think about writing alt text. The unbelievable gall of this person. I saw myself as a dancing monkey, giving away photos and making effort to write alt text, while myself not being able to make both my car payment and buy groceries, and one person I was performing for was a guy who can drive cars and buy groceries (both, without problem) and who feels entitled to talk down to me about how I write alt text. You can say I threw the baby out with the bath water by canceling my social media over this guy—but this guy was just one of one million people who came out of the woodwork to advise me on how to alt text my images. Mastodon: get over yourself. You make me feel unwelcome
I created a Mastodon account to use in case people want to talk to me about my books. It's linked at the bottom of this blog