I have no idea what I'm doing

I used to love social media. By that, I mean what social media was before people started calling it social media. When Twitter and Facebook were in their infancy and I came across my first true love, Jaiku. That feels like decades ago now!

Then Jaiku got swallowed into the abyss and other things came to life briefly to replace them (identi.ca, google+). But it was never quite the same, and things have gotten steadily worse ever since. I've long hated and stopped using Facebook. That just turned into some weird place where you could see what all your relatives had for breakfast that day. Not for me.

Twitter is a whole other ballgame, but ultimately for the most part equally unappealing, just for different reasons. Nobody actually talks to you on Twitter anymore. At least not with any kind of regularity. Most people (and I'm equally guilty of this at times) just want to shout their grievances with life into the void, where it gets swallowed whole and leaves you with a sense of hollowness. There's really not all that much "social" about it these days. Mastodon is marginally better. Slightly less signal to noise ratio, but it's still in essence a clone of Twitter.

So, mostly I just dip in and out. Sometimes I don't even bother to look for months at a time. Often the latter is better for me (definitely better for my mental health). But I miss... something. Friendship maybe, or at least a sense of camaraderie.

So after hearing @dickturpin talking about Hive on Twitter, I thought I'd come and check it out. Thus far, I literally have no idea what I'm doing or where this is going, but here I am.

Oh, I should mention that before the days of Jaiku and Twitter, I used to be a very frequent blogger. Starting about a month after WordPress was released. Quite a long time ago now, and none of my blogs from back then are still up and running. I used to love blogging, mostly about tech related geekery with a bit of life stuff thrown in. I made friends, they commented on my blog and in turn I commented on theirs. Then Twitter came along and a whole swathe of people stopped posting to their blogs. Twitter killed all but one of my circles blogging lives.

So maybe Hive is a good halfway house? A place to connect to people where you're not given a stupidly small character limit and can actually communicate with more than shallow soundbites?

That'd be quite nice.