My brain woke me up around 4 this morning and concluded that I probably neglected my social platform recently. And it was right.

You see, Micro.blog is doing a fair job at reposting my stuff over to Mastodon, BlueSky, and Tumblr — but it’s only that: a fair job. It’s OK. It’s automatic, so some of the nuances that should go into a post on each platform are lost.

For example, Micro.blog doesn’t do hashtags for its timeline. I actually like it. It makes it stand out more from the rest, and its use of emoticons is a nice touch. I could include hashtags in my posts here, but they look out of place and ugly. Besides, Mastodon and Tumblr don’t seem to pick them up anyway. This means I need to go to these platforms and edit my posts and add hashtags manually.

Meanwhile, hashtags from Micro.blog do get to BlueSky. Kind of. It seems the first hashtag gets picked up, but the rest don’t — I’m still investigating. But then BlueSky itself doesn’t allow editing posts, so I can’t make the changes I need there, like condensing a summary so it doesn’t get cut in the middle (which I can do easily on Mastodon); I have to delete my entire post there and do it all over again, which gets old fast especially with images and alt descriptions.

And if the above is not complicated enough yet, I don’t see all the interactions I get on these platforms. Micro.blog shows me replies from BlueSky and Mastodon (I get replies from Mastodon all the time), but not likes, or retoots or tetweets, or reposts or whatever the hell they’re called on BlueSky.

I also miss out on new interesting people I might want to follow. I like RSS, and I enjoy using it, but it’s not a replacement for hearing from people who spew sentences here and there that I tend to enjoy — sort of my online buddies. This is very evident in Mastodon, for example, where I have a dedicated list I call “friends” that displays posts from those folks, but I need to be on Mastodon to interact with them.

If this post conveys anything besides confusion, I hope it’s the fact that reaching out to people can easily be a full‑time job, if you consider Cory Doctorow’s routine. Actually, I wrote him an email yesterday, asking for his advice, and he surprised me by replying within a couple of hours. I don’t know why I was somewhat disappointed to find out that he has no solution for this problem — I mean, he explained what a mess his routine is in the essay that prompted me to write to him in the first place…?

There is no clear solution. If I want to engage more people on the social networks they’re on, I need to engage more people on those networks. It’s tedious and time‑consuming, and time and energy are already pretty scarce resources for me, so I need to tread carefully — not to mention that most of these places spew depressing and upsetting opinions (politics) I need to avoid. But isn’t that the song and dance we all do online to one degree or another?