Earlier this week, I got caught up in the zeitgeist and thought that I’d better sign up for an account on Mastodon, a social media service being touted as an alternative to an Elon Musk–controlled Twitter. Because Mastodon is not a single, unified platform but a decentralized collection of federated servers, this was slightly more complicated than expected, confronting me immediately with choices I was not competent to make about what sort of experience I was hoping to have with “microblogging.” I had long been accustomed to not thinking about that, to accepting Twitter as given, as the way of the world, an experience beyond justification. It was like weather, something to cope with and complain about, but now it seemed I was being invited to try to control it, which is like being asked to contemplate a world without weather at all.