My friend Wess Daniels is very cor­rect when he calls him­self an ear­ly adopter of social media. I’ve learned over the years to wait a few beats before fol­low­ing him down into some new cool ser­vice, just because who has the time? But to his cred­it, I’m pret­ty sure he was the first cheer­leader for Slack I had heard and I and my work col­leagues live in it all day now.

Over time he’s become more skep­ti­cal of social media:

> These com­pa­nies have fig­ured out how to make mon­ey off of every frac­tion of a sec­ond we use these plat­forms, mean­ing their busi­ness mod­el is not about help­ing us do what we came to the plat­form to do, their mod­el is to make sure we stay on as long as they can pos­si­bly keep us there and bring us back as often as pos­si­ble. Dis­trac­tion and pre­oc­cu­pa­tion is the name of the game.

I’ve cut back and dead­opt­ed plen­ty of social media. I’ve become ever more com­fort­able in my per­son­al blog. But I do miss the cama­raderie of the old days. Twit­ter RIP was quite a com­mu­ni­ty. I’m active on Bluesky but I’ll post things I know are inter­est­ing and hear nothing.

This mon­th’s issue of *Friends Jour­nal* is our annu­al fic­tion issues. The idea to do fic­tion orig­i­nat­ed quite lit­er­al­ly in a 2021 tweet from Annalee Flower Horne: “[Psst can we have a Quak­er sci­ence fic­tion anthology.](https://www.friendsjournal.org/in-but-not-of-this-world/)” I can’t think of any social media plat­form that has the mix of ban­ter and friend­ship and per­son­al­i­ty of gold­en age Twit­ter. The plat­forms kept chas­ing after mon­ey and algo­rithems; these days they’re full of AI slop. I can get the motivi­a­tion to deadopt.

Ear­ly Adop­tion (in the Oppo­site Direc­tion) — Part One — gath­er­ing in light a blog by wess daniels 

I’ve been ear­ly adopt­ing as long as I’ve been old enough to adopt some­thing. As a child, I…

gath­er­ing in light a blog by wess daniels