+++
title = "Digital chimney smoke?"
author = ["George M Jones"]
publishDate = 2020-04-27
lastmod = 2023-12-06T05:46:10-05:00
tags = ["life", "twitter", "DigitalFrontiers"]
categories = ["blog"]
draft = false
+++

Daniel Boone is quoted (via Hubert Humphrey) as saying

> when he could see the smoke from another chimney, felt himself too
> crowded and moved further out into the wilderness.

Mark Twain said

> Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.

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I was on email as early as 1980 on a DEC20. I was on Usenet news
when it was the digital frontier and on the Internet in the
mid-80s, 10 years or so before the Web.  I helped bring America
online working at CompuServe before America Online existed.  I
quit Facebook in the run-up to the 2016 election as it got too
political and now I find that my main digital platform (Twitter)
is home to the daily, um, ?sophisms? of the President who spawned
the political rhetoric I fled.

Is it time to move on?  Time to find another avant-guard tech hole
to clime into?  Thanks to the Internet there are infinitely more
options than just the dial-up BBS systems of the early 80s.

I was a little sad to loose contact with all the elementary school
friends that Facebook enabled me to reconnect with after 40 years
(OK, not really) and I would be sad too loose touch with the zany
[#ClassicsTwitter](https://twitter.com/search?q=%2523classicstwitter&src=typed_query) crowd ([aeneasgoogling apud elysium](https://twitter.com/aeneasgoogling) I'm looking at
you) that tweets in Latin.

Where to go?  Maybe just pick up stakes, head west and see where I
find myself?