urge becomes pointless money sink
I've been fretting over the fact that Tumblr is my main form of social media, considering how hostile it is in terms of user interface and features (at least to my interests), considering its shaky moderation, considering the massive money sink and Automattic's mercurial management decisions.
The reason why this blog exists is that I've been trying to settle elsewhere, to both encourage me to introspect and bounce ideas around socially as well as find other people who prefer this kind of long-form socialization, be it through posted back-and-forth or through e-mail. Unfortunately, I failed to urge surf in a moment of panic and now I have iteration number, like, ten? of a self hosted mastodon instance, even though I don't know how to micro blog to save my life and I find it extraordinarily difficult to socialize in those spaces (although the followers-only feature is a big tally in the pros list for me; the public nature of the blog sometimes overwhelms me.)
Luckily for me, it's on very cheap hosting so I haven't burned through my savings for something I don't think I will use. Still, I'll give it a couple of months to see if I find any use for it...
There's some things happening in my life offline, related to medical circumstances and long-term unemployment, that have me simultaneously excited and worried at the prospect of spending less time online. I'm aware that I've been needing both a source of income and a routine shake-up to get rid of my dependence on social media to make connections with people, even if the connections I currently have that I made through Tumblr or the Fediverse are dear to me. To put it lightly: I need to touch grass. I need to socialize in offline environments, I need constructive hobbies, I need a source of income, I need to be busy for at least 8 hours a day so that regulating urges is easier, so that I can be more autonomous even if both for disability reasons and for "we are an intrinsically interdependent species" reasons I can't be fully self-sufficient.