About a month ago, I stopped using almost all of my social media (with the exception of Instagram). It’s been an interesting month and I still have mixed feelings about it.

I’ve been using Twitter since around 2008, so I’ve been there since its early days. I stopped using Twitter actively a little bit before it was acquired by the Muskrat, and once that happened, I deactivated my account there and moved first to Mastodon, and later also to Bluesky.

I have not particularly enjoyed Twitter for a long, long time even before it went to shit. Twitter (and its clones) are an absolute cesspool of negativity, propaganda and doom. Just scrolling through Twitter made me feel bad. There was a phase when I unfollowed A LOT of accounts, around 3-4 years before the downfall, because I couldn’t take the negativity anymore. I reduced my follows to mostly people that I actually know, either from my real life, from the 00s blogosphere, or other internet friends that I’ve been acquainted with for a long time. But no influencers, no news sites, nothing else.

For a while, that was quite nice. But even my curated list of follows was starting to become a challenge to follow, because of the constant doom and gloom retweets. I know the world is shit, but constantly being reminded of it just gives me unbearable anxiety.

So then Twitter died, and I moved to Mastodon. Mastodon was a really nice, very interactive community at first. But it’s not the most accessible platform, and most of the friends I was following on Twitter did not move to Mastodon. My timeline there was a bit sad and empty, so I followed people that seemed nice on the Mastodon network but that I didn’t know personally, with a lot of trial and error.

Then Bluesky came, and everyone who was still on Twitter and who didn’t want to deal with Mastodon went there (which was a lot of people). I was never too happy with that, because Bluesky is made by the same people who sold Twitter to a Nazi. Why would you want to trust these people??? But I felt if I want to kinda keep up with my friends, I had to sign up there. Sigh.

Now my social media was fragmented across two platforms. A nice, pseudo-inclusive one, and a somewhat hypocritical one. But I soon ended up on both platforms with similar problems as before. On Mastodon, there were many people in my timeline who kept reposting the most unbearable propaganda, as well as people who I didn’t really know personally but who seemed nice, but who just posted too much uninteresting shit. On Bluesky, the level of apocalypse anxiety was getting dangerously close to Twitter levels again.

I also noticed very often that I don’t really like myself on those platforms, because I tended to use them a lot to vent about things that happened to me, or things that really annoyed me. Precisely the kind of negativity that I hate about these platforms.

I realized that whenever I scrolled through my fediverse / bsky timeline, it didn’t make me feel good. So I tried to stop. I deleted my bookmarks (and re-added them) a bout 3 times. I set my phone to black and white mode when using these apps. I believe it took a couple of months, but eventually I made it. I deleted the apps completely from my phone and the bookmarks from my PC’s browser, and I haven’t checked them since.

So do I miss them? I definitely do not miss the despair, anxiety and anger that browsing the content on these sites gave me. What I do miss sometimes though, is a place to share my random, short thoughts. Such as for example how emotional I felt about watching the second season of Interview with the Vampire and that I should probably re-read the books, or that after a bunch of mediocre episodes, finally “73 Yards” was a good new Doctor Who episode. Things I definitely would have tweeted / tooted / skeeted in the past.

Now I just keep these thoughts to myself, as I do not really know anyone in my life to share them with. I guess I’ve introverted even more into myself. I guess I could probably write things like that in my WhatsApp or Instagram status, but are those really the right places for that? Doesn’t feel like it.

Which brings me to Instagram, and you might be wondering why I still use that if I hate social media so much? Instagram is thankfully so far the only platform that seems mostly unaffected by the doom and propaganda. It’s the ultimate feel good platform, and that’s definitely something I need in the current state of the world – something to just shut off my brain for a bit and look at pretty pictures. Of course there are people on instagram who try to flood their timeline with political messages as well, but I tend to just mute or unfollow those, even if it makes me very sad because they were always some of my best friends.

Perhaps I should go back to blogging my stream of consciousness once a week or so, but who would even read that in this day and age, when the only way people actually pay attention to blog posts is when they’re cross-posted on social media? 🤔