How do you manage your online presence(s)?

Drop Point
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Lately, I’ve some doubts about my digital presence. For obvious reasons, I don’t want to join other corpo techbros para/anti-social networks and I’m ok with fedi. That said, even a curated network on fedi has become a bit too much doom/whine-scrolling for my tastes and my idea of preserving my mood. It’s the way I’m wired, sorry for that.

I’m always on the verge of moving just here for my truest digital persona and use fedi mostly to gather news relevant for my jobs and other content inspirations. But huh, maybe it’s too much? And I have also a digital garden to make it grow.

Well, in short: I’m a bit of social mess atm.

Question: what kind of digital presence(s) do you have now and what are - if any - your plans for the next future? Do you think you’ve reached the best balance among digital personas and accounts? What’s your digital life secret recipe?

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This is a really good question, and probably one that all of us should think about, if I’m being honest.

My current digital presence is a blog/digital garden, several alts on fedi (mainly just placeholders, but some of them are focused on content like Bookwyrm), and I participate in a whole bunch of CI-related (OTS, really) extras that we have available - Lucy Relay Chat, Matrix, Discord, and this place. And I also have a Bluesky account, mainly just to see what’s happening over there; I don’t use it very much.

My plans for the next future are essentially to return to the ways of the past: self-host all the things I can, join webrings and actively maintain my own lists of links, and try to move all of my long-form and things I wouldn’t say on Fedi onto my one-way digital garden (because no comments). I’m a chatty boi, and I’ve been struggling with some depression and such lately, so I’m trying to make my fedi and real-time interactions more generally positive and save my soapboxes and screeds for my garden (but as you know from interacting with me, this has been slow going :wink:)

Ideally, if I get a new job, I’ll likely get another alt somewhere or convert one of my existing ones into a more “professional” account limited to the subject domain of whatever it is that I’m working on. My plan is to keep public and professional SynAck completely separate from the SynAck that currently exists today, and I try pretty hard not to leak any of my IRL PII details into the SynAck space so I can say what I want to say. I know that it will all be linked to me (if it hasn’t been already), but my goal is to have a solid separation between public me and private me.

And so far, knowing that there are places like PreemChrome and Totentanz where I can post things at a much slower pace that will be seen by a lot fewer people while still having the facility for news-gathering and interactions via multiple different community-focused tools has been a pretty good balance for me.

Oh, and I’ve gone back to using RSS readers and have been getting more into that to get my news without all the associated social commentary that Fedi tacks on.

And I try to avoid all the drama traps of the various social outlets as much as possible.

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Fedi, here, and Discord are my main three. Been trying to get my BFFs off of FB Messenger onto something safer, but no dice so far.

I have presented on assorted other sites, but with far less usage. Tumblr and Twitter/bluesky for porn essentially, though the latter two I use methods to inhibit my ability to interact with them. I also follow an assortment of art sites and have for years. I enjoy that.

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Masto, here and Discord mostly for gaming with friends or the weekly CI HoloCall.
I have a personal website but I am a noob at website building so it’s pretty clumsy and simple, and is basically an scratchpad/experiment for learning. But it’s cheap, and it’s mine to fiddle with.
I use Lucy.bz sometimes, Matrix once in a great while, but those are more messaging things to me.
I play with RedNote a little, mostly out of curiosity and there are some pretty cool people on there that I vibe with.
I have tried to avoid or quit every enshittified corpo platform, no good will come from any of them. Discord is next, but I don’t yet have a great alternative for gaming voice chat that other people will actually use.

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This is for sure an important question.
I have a presence on almost everything, but that doesn’t mean I use them, I just have things parked so it’s ever-so-slighly harder to do identity theft.

I mainly use fedi (CI)…I read some subreddits, and once in a blue moon post a reply, and I use youtube for watching and posting the occasional video.

Unfortunately, the messaging side is WAY more of a mess. I have almost all of them running, because I’ve lived in different countries, communicating with friends/family means some use FB messenger, others WhatsApp, others Discord, others Telegram, and a couple Signal and one friend exclusively uses Matrix. Ugh. That said I don’t rely on any of them.

I think the biggest crutch for me is github…because so many projects use it, its easy to fork and do PRs for things I care about…moving away from that is probably something I should do, but it would be a huge amount of work.

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I deleted all my tech-bro monolith accounts, which came surprisingly easy after being an early adopter and trying so many “next big thing” sites over the years (Compuserve, AOL, Geocities, MySpace, Tumblr, Wordpress, Circles, Path, Twitter, Facebook, Insta, you name it I was probably there).

Part of my digital detox was also revisiting my domains as I’d got vanity URLs and simple sites for pretty much every online persona I’ve had. That list got culled too.

Now I have ProblemFox and a more work-safe alt on Fedi, and then there’s my oldest persona still floating out there with the odd updates on its vanity page so old friends can find me. Aside from Fedi, there are a couple of smolWeb gardens on HTTPS, and a pair of Gemini Capsules that I keep for the digital gardening (are they distributed allotments at this point?) this scratches the blogging, small community itch that I miss from my first days online. I’m limiting my bookmarks, and trying to post any links I want to save on my Gemini capsule so I have them self-hosted but device and cloud independent.

The only nod to corpo web left are my obligatory LinkedIn account, which is firewalled from everything else and doesn’t link back to any of the above, and an ancient Flickr account where I host the creative commons licenced photographs I’ve shared over the years.

Messaging, I ditched FB and Whatsapp at the start of the year. I live overseas from many of my friends, and so some direct conversations are needed. Now I have everyone who is critical on Signal, and open SMS for those who just can’t make the change but I barely use it.

There’s a couple of XMPP accounts, but they are used so infrequently I could lose them and not notice. Oh, and a Threema account that nobody else has the details for, but created a long time ago and might be useful one day.

Yeah, guess that is a mess too.

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And there are some things that rely on GitHub specifically and don’t work with other alternatives, even if they’re forks of GitHub or use essentially the same protocols.