Livre d'Or

I definitely find DW lively, active and a good community. Your subscription meme and things like it mean I'm always meeting interesting new people here. The problem is that most of my old friends aren't here; a few are still on LJ which is no more than a mild nuisance, but many are on Facebook and Twitter only, or have left social media altogether and want to go back to one-to-one correspondence. Which is a desire I completely respect in theory, I just don't know how to manage the sort of regular correspondence that maintains relationships.

Somebody described Twitter as social proprioception, and I like that framing. It gives me a general sense of where my friends are at, what they're reading, how they're feeling. And I don't have to carefully read and remember the entire firehose, any more than I have to consciously remember where my nose is most of the time.

I like the idea of setting aside times to read an hour worth of FB, so I keep up with things but don't let the general negativity of the site be a constant presence in my life. And similar to your idea about Twitter, I think I could do with being a bit more aggressive about blocking and muting unwanted content. Right now a big segment of my feed is about the Swedish election, which is a totally reasonable thing to talk about, except that the big news story is that the racist party (BNP equivalent) got about a sixth of the vote and no party can form a governing coalition without them, and it's really hard stuff to read. And maybe I should be looking into Tinfoil, at that.

I know what you mean about work email, handling email is a big part of my job and maybe that's why I don't have time or energy left to deal with personal email. Thanks for that point, I hadn't quite considered just how much work email is a factor.