Quality Time

Anyone who spends any time online knows the benefits of using the Internet as well as the annoyances.  The key is to strike a balance between the two, and ever so slightly in favour of the former.

Recently, I've been reappraising my own use of the Internet; from social media, through hobby forums, to online chat.  This was prompted by a realisation that sometimes I would be "clicking for clicking's sake".

Here are two things that I've done in the last week to improve the quality of my time online and free up time to devote to my hobbies.

Minimum Twitter
In the last six months I've written two posts about the demise of Twitter and what it means for me.  It's fair to say that things are still in flux, but one thing is clear: my use of Twitter has reached a bare minimum.

As of today I only use Twitter to do two things.  Firstly, I keep up to date with Warrington Football club (WTFC) and my fellow fans. Secondly, I follow a few hobby "influencers" & some normal hobby people.

Any interaction is by direct messages as I no longer tweet, retweet, like or otherwise interact via the public interface.  Effectively, the vast majority of my Twitter use is now in "read only" mode.

I see this situation lasting for some time as the people I follow are unlikely to move to the Fediverse any time soon.

A world beyond Facebook
I have been a long term member of a small, if well established, hobby forum.  As with all such things my interest has declined over the years, but until recently I still visited the forum every once in a while; mainly out of a mix of curiosity & nostalgia.

Each visit yielded only a few interesting posts and I have been wondering why I bothered for some time.  Nonetheless, one of the topics I really liked was the "what have you painted recently" thread.

From looking at this thread, it is clear that many forum users are not that technically skilled.  The number of photos posted has declined significantly since the forum reached its image hosting limit many months ago.  Some users manage to use an image hosting service or post links to their blogs.  Others struggle, reducing the overall value of the thread.

Recently, however, the behaviour of one member made me realise that the time had come to leave the forum.  He repeatedly posted image links which lead to a private Facebook group which shows nothing but a notice saying the group is private!  To cap it all the "author" thinks this will encourage people to join Facebook and then join their group.

This is shameful on so many levels:

• The link is utterly pointless unless you are prepared to join Facebook, if you don't already have an account, and then apply for membership of the group. Talk about deferred gratification.
• As nothing is visible, the links provide no motivation whatsoever to go any further. The pictures could show expertly painted miniatures or be of complete and utter rubbish.
• Clearly, the poster expects Facebook to act as a content delivery network or an image hosting service; which it is not. Presumably, this is because he can't, or doesn't want to, use one of the many image hosting services.
• Facebook profiles all visitors to their site so you get a shadow, or non-member, profile as soon as you click the link. If your cookie security is bad you'll also get quite few tracking cookies as well.

This is just plain disrespectful of fellow hobbyists and is probably born from their limited technical understanding and abilities.  Time to move on.

Closing remarks
That's it. One less forum and minimum Twitter (or should that be X?).  Slowly but surely I feel I'm getting more control of my use of the Internet.  This leaves more time for things like painting and writing blog articles.