I haven’t been perfect in my efforts to stay away from traditional social media. I have made more posts than I should have, and have read many more than anyone should since I made the decision to step back a bit. I have been better, though, which is … better.
In the last few days, I have been especially active on Facebook, which I don’t really like. Both my wife and my daughter tested positive for COVID last week. I am not happy about this at all, and I used Facebook to let the world know. I don’t totally regret doing that. Sometimes misery-outrage loves company, and traditional social media is definitely a place you can find misery-outrage.
I have found something in the social media “space” that I think is pretty great, though. Slowly. Slowly is kind of like a social network in that it is a place to meet people and exchange messages. But, it’s very different from the others in that it forces you to be patient. Instead of your friends getting your message(s) immediately, they have to wait, sometimes more than a day, to read your message. The idea is that you have to wait for each message to go “through the mail;” the farther the message has to travel “geographically,” the longer the delay in delivery.
Slowly tries to be something like a traditional pen pal, including some stamp-collecting features. Slowly will auto match you with folks all across the world or you can browse a directory and find interesting people on your own. It’s a nice concept, and the community there is friendly, patient, and almost entirely wonderful … unlike so many other places.
Have I been a perfect digital citizen? Not even close. My most-recent Facebook post was pretty nasty.1 But, something like Slowly might help me (and/or you) to be a little better. I have been using it for several months, and it’s been pretty great so far. I have “friends” in the US, India, France, Benin, Estonia, Poland, Canada, the Philippines, Russia, and the U.K, writing back and forth in both English and French.
At the moment, I still don’t really care all that much. I am not in a place to feel lots of nice thoughts toward the situation my family is in at the moment (and the fact that it was largely avoidable).