Though I've been away from social media, more or less, it's hard to stop thinking in a social sharing mindset. I still think in remarks of 140 characters or less. When I see something interesting, the thought is to snap a picture and post to Instagram. Instead, I snap a picture and add it to my journal in Day One at the end of the day. I can't be the only one.

There's enough worry about passive social media consumers, wallowing in what Michael Lopp described as “other people's moments.” He's not wrong, either. However, without people sharing their own moments, those passive consumers of moments would find something else. What is it that motivates us to share so many of our moments for strangers?

Part of it is our nature as social animals. That can't be denied. Something about access to an audience, however, makes so many of us willing to take photos of our dinners, take six second videos at concerts, or just post whatever comes to our mind at any moment. To quote my friend Jonathan Pfeffer, “The Internet is a void.” If so, something must fill it.

What does being always on for our audience, however large or small, do to us? How does it change our relationship to the world, and to each other? If all of our moments are grist for the mill of social media, if we live our lives constantly sharing our experiences—or at least the subset of those we think will be best received—it can distort the very idea of what our lives mean. There's no room for a rich, internal life in a world where even minor matters are shared.

That's not to say that the internal life is gone forever. We're all still adapting to the potential to be always on. The possibility exists that we will push back, as a culture, against the stress of being always on. We'll find the balance. However, it's to the benefit of Facebook, Twitter, et al, that we feed the beast with our thoughts, photos, and links. It's to their benefit that we Like, Favorite, Share, and Retweet, so they know more about us and what we like. They won't give up without a fight.

It’s been two weeks since I uninstalled Twitter from my phone, deactivated my Facebook account, and turned off almost all the social media feeds I spend far too much time on. In just this short amount of time, it’s already been far more effective than my previous attempt. I’ve finished reading several books, in print and on my Kindle, done plenty of writing, and settling into the domestic routine of life in a new apartment with my partner. Not having the streams to distract me has helped me focus. I can think more in long-form, instead of 140-character chunks. After dropping a huge Tweetstorm, it’s harder to re-channel those thoughts into a longer piece.

Before typing this up, I finished reading Dave Eggers’s latest novel, The Circle. It’s a science-fiction satire about a technology company that’s Apple, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all rolled into one, The main character, Mae, works at the titular company as a Customer Experience agent, and as part of her job, starts to live in the omnipresent hyper-streams of the future network. As one character describes what happens to Mae:

“…[A]ll this stuff you’re involved in, it’s all gossip. It’s people talking about each other behind their backs. That’s the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication. And besides that, it’s fucking dorky.”

Again, this is satire, and the character who drops that quote is pretty much a Captain Obvious Aesop, but there’s a kernel of truth to the quote. It’s one thing to keep in touch, it’s another thing to just spew your brainfarts into the stream with no sense of why. Why do we do it? We want to be liked, fav’d, retweeted… we want to be loved. And it’s done in the form of, as said Aesop describes as “snack food.” I’m sure you all read Mat Honan’s excellent essay about what happened when he liked everything he saw on Facebook for two days. You should also read Elan Morgan’s piece about what happened when he stopped liking things on Facebook, and Anil Dash’s essay on “The Semiotics of Like”. This isn’t even a new thing: Fish: A Tap Essay asked similar questions, over two years ago.

Reading The Circle and those above linked essays has me thinking a lot about what I’m going to do when my sabbatical ends, as it must, and I go back into the streams. I have to think about my relationship with the people on these services, as well as my relationship with the service itself. What data I surrender, where I choose to view and post into my streams, what I post, and what I allow to bug me. I’ll have more detailed thoughts closer to the end of my sabbatical, largely around Facebook, which is the worst offender in abusing my data, and the biggest of my social timesinks according to RescueTime. The only thing that’s allowed me to take action, however, stepping back and cutting everything off, allowing everything to come to a balance, and adjusting accordingly.

When you live in the streams and get lost in other people’s moments, it’s easy to lose perspective of who you are—your dreams, your ideas, your relationships. They all get subsumed in the long stream of data that washes over you every time you launch an app. Regaining perspective has been the greatest benefit of this sabbatical. I don’t want to lose it all when I go back. If I can’t go back with a sense of mindfulness, awareness, and perspective about the role these services play in my life, I may as well just cut them out together. I don’t want to be the anti-social media extremist, nor do I want to drown in the stream. There’s a middle ground to find.

This past January, I took a few weeks off from social media: Facebook, Twitter, App.Net, Instagram, Tumblr—all the various streams that dominate my online time. The goal then was to free my mind and my time for more constructive things—writing, reading, making my own moments. Instead, I blew most of the freed up time playing SimCity and finding other diversions. While it did set me off on a goal of being more judicious in what I opt to consume online, the entire endeavor must be rated a failure.

Even though I failed in my first attempt to sublimate a Facebook and Twitter addiction, the idea of breaking up and finding some distance between myself and the firehose of streams has remained an ideal in the romantic sense. To free my mind and my ego from the petty concerns of the stream—not just the empty sharing of thoughts and ideas, but checking to see who’s “Liked” my statuses, who’s fav’d and RT’d me on Twitter. Enough.

It was a Twitter conversation back in June, I think with S. V. Macias, that had me thinking of trying a new social media sabbatical. The ideals were the same, but I’m thinking about my approach in a different way. Instead of sublimating my social media time with other time spent on the computer, this is time I could spend doing things I need and want to do. I’m putting hard limits on my options, and even opting to just plain disconnect from time to time as necessary to live my life, and live it away from the streams.

I am going to miss the streams, though. In the last few weeks, I’ve had some great Twitter conversations, especially with Sid O’Neill. We’ve chatted about the role of technology in our lives, the business of tech (and how little we care for it), diversity, and even the third rail of faith and religion. I’ve loved every minute of it, though I don’t know if Sid has. (I kid because I love.) I also worry, as a number of my friends are musicians, and use Facebook to announce events and shows. Even if I’m trying to avoid the Fear of Missing Out, I don’t want to miss a chance to support my friends for some curious notion of re-finding a balance in my digital life.

But this is the risk we take. We had ways of keeping in touch before Twitter and Facebook, and those ways haven’t gone around. If I take a picture of my lunch, and don’t post it to Instagram, it still exists. I’m taking an extreme measure, because I feel it’s the best way to figure out just how much I need these things in my life. I already know they need me to feed the machine. I just need to know if what I’m giving up to them is worth what I’m getting back.

There’s all this time. Time to listen to music, take walks through my neighborhood, time to read books and time to make words. I want to do all those things, and be present. There’s also time to cook the dinner, wash the dishes, run on the treadmill, do the laundry, and hug and kiss my partner. I want to do all those things, and be present too. I want to be in touch with the smart, funny, and interesting people of the Internet. I want to do that, and be present. Only that last one requires a screen, and an Internet connection, as well as time. I’m using too much of that time on the being in touch, and not enough of it elsewhere. It’s time to rethink that.

Marco Arment released his long awaited podcast app, Overcast, today. As soon as the tweet went out that it was live, my Twitter stream became loaded with praise from beta testers, links to reviews, and more than a few jokes about when Marco was going to sell the app. Which lead to an interesting, if convoluted, conversation between Sid O'Neill, and The Typist on the echo chamber of praise and the potential bias inherent in Marco's supporters/beta testers singing the product's praise on their blogs. In terms of bias, the conversation wasn't about Marco per se, but whether one's biases in promoting a friend's work compromises journalistic ethics.

In terms of ethics, it comes down to trust. A number of the people promoting Overcast—John Siracusa, John Gruber, Jim Dalrymple, Federico Viticci, just to name a few—have earned my trust by writing quality, (mostly) unbiased technology journalism and criticism over the years. These are people who know good software, and so does Marco Arment. I've used Instapaper for years, as well as Tumblr. I can't speak for his other famous app, Nursing Clock, as I've had no cause to use it. (You gotta love the icon, though.) Overcast has the pedigree of a developer who knows his stuff, and the support of a group of technologists who have proven they know their stuff too. Yes, much of the positive buzz is coming from people who are friends and collaborators with Marco, but they've proven I can trust their judgment.

In any sort of independent community, having an audience of not only fans who support you, but influential voices who support you is critical to your success. This holds true, even for a “big name” indie creator. If it comes off as a backpat circlejerk to someone outside of that circle of voices, which it can be, understand that it's the nature of the beast. When you're an independent creator, this is life or death. I have friends who are professional working musicians, and I both love their work and will sing its praises to anyone who listens when they deliver something new. I don't do it here, but I might in the future.

The inherent risk, as The Typist notes, is the bias of friendship overriding the quality of the work, and the validity of the endorsement. Again, it's a matter of trust. Both the trust of our audiences in knowing we know of what we speak, and also the trust of the creator in knowing they'll get an unbiased critique. I like to think that my musician friends can trust I will be unbiased when criticizing work, though it's telling that none have offered me a chance to hear any works-in-progress. To use Overcast as an example, many of Marco's beta testers are known for being critical and opinionated on software—John Siracusa enough so that his blog, and former podcast are both called Hypercritical. John Gruber is infamous for being borderline anal-retentive on software design, which shows in his app Vesper. If anyone is going to give Marco an unbiased criticism of his app, it's going to be those two. (Siracusa will be delivering a full critique on the next Accidental Tech Podcast)

Of course, the bigger the name, independent or not, the more people will be chiming in with their own criticism. I worry more about bias coming from this larger group, to be honest. Most are just people who want their own voices to be heard in the din of technology blogging. Some are people with a vendetta and want it to be known to the world. It's, again, the nature of the ever-changing beast of online publishing. The latest episode of Back to Work covers that in detail, with great personal stories. Talking up a hot topic is a proven way to get hits, and if their Google Juice is strong enough, a well written review of Overcast might get them noticed. It's the potential starting point for discovering a new, trusted voice to add value to the conversation—but for most of us, it's just another annoying retweet to scroll past.

For people like Sid, who grow tired of the din of echo chamber, there are only two ways out. One is exerting more control over what you see by judicious muting, unfollowing, or just stepping away. If the stream of Overcast tweets grew too much, I could easy have told Tweetbot to silence any mention of it for the next 24 hours. The second is to pay it no mind, and write the Internet you want to read. Which is why I'm writing up this metacommentary on the whole conversation around the Overcast conversation. There's a lot of important issues to discuss around technology journalism, independent creation, and what we choose—or don't choose—to see in our streams.

And we might not have had the conversation at all without some big name indie developer putting out yet another podcast app. Funny how the Internet works.

Full disclosure: Dalton Caldwell once paid for my brunch, including the Bloody Mary.

There’s been a bit of ink spilled over the latest App.net State of the Union, wherein it is written:

The good news is that the renewal rate was high enough for App.net to be profitable and self-sustaining on a forward basis…. The bad news is that the renewal rate was not high enough for us to have sufficient budget for full-time employees… including founders.

App.net is not shutting down, unlike photo hosting site MLKSHK, but the rhetoric around the announcement makes it sound like the lights could go out tomorrow, that App.net is a failure, and all of that. If it was a failure, they probably would turn out the lights.

I’m a paid App.Net member, and while it took me some time to get up to speed on the service, it’s where I go for conversation. From my initial skepticism, I became a champion of the service when it went freemium. As long as the server still runs, and my preferred apps still work, I’ll be sticking around on App.Net for a while. I might even pay to renew. I’ve got until October to decide.

But is conversation alone worth $36 a year for access? App.Net’s public face is that of a Twitter-like service, though it’s clear they want it to be more. There’s plenty of apps that build on the service as a backend, though nothing terribly groundbreaking. I’ve used a Foursquare clone, and two Instagram clones, and neither really stuck with me. I’m back on both original services now. I’m using a whopping 65.2 megabytes of the 10GB of storage I pay for. I have to wonder how many others have made better use of these features.

The value proposition of App.Net was a platform for social apps. I don’t know if they communicated this well enough, because as far as most people I know who aren’t in the ADN ecosystem think, it’s Twitter you have to pay for. Granted, it’s really hard to communicate what App.Net really is to ordinary people. One of the smarted moves the App.Net team did was move to a freemium model. The more people who use the service, the better the chance they’d use some of the third party services built on it. It didn’t work. People smarter than me have already opined about why.

And that sucks. I did my best to evangelize App.Net to my friends, but kept hitting the “Twitter you have to pay for” issue. I still follow more people on Twitter than on App.Net, because more people I care about are active there. I probably won’t leave App.Net—there’s still activity and friends using the service—but I don’t know if I’ll re-up my subscription. Am I getting $36 per year value? I don’t know yet. I have until October to decide. The real moment of truth will come in a year, when everyone who renewed this time get to decide if they’re getting their money’s worth. What I do in October will be a blip. May 2015 could kill the service, and I hope it doesn’t.