Twitter was bought by the villain from Glass Onion and the people I followed are no longer there. Facebook is for grandparents and right-wing echo chambers. LiveJournal – remember LiveJournal?! – was my original fix, before it was purchased by a Russian concern, purportedly to tamp down on dissidents. Reddit is reaching the final stages of enshittification – implosion – like a distant star going supernova. LinkedIn is generally full of people talking about their work so much you’re curious if they actually do their work. Mastadon is confusing. Discord is great for small groups, but quickly devolves into noise after you add the 20th person to the server. Instagram was fine until I never got to see my friends’ posts anymore, instead being shoveled content from people I would actively avoid in real life.
But I’m not telling you anything that hasn’t been written about many times before.
The best parts of social media, to me at least, was keeping tabs on friends (particularly as we left college and begun our adult lives) as well as being exposed to ideas related to topics and hobbies I care about. I find myself posting to social media less and less, since my friends don’t necessarily see my posts and I don’t necessarily see theirs. Social media isn’t about building or maintaining communities anymore; it’s about building a platform to keep you engaged as long as possible to sneak in as many ads as it possible.
In short, I’m not being served the content I came looking for – my friends and hobbies – but yet I would flit between social mediums, chasing that content. I’d be served it for a time, before more ads needed to be sold, the content no longer focused on friends and hobbies, but instead on memes and rage-bait, and I’d decamp for the next platform.
That cycle seems untenable going forward. Slowly over the years, as I’ve been finding sites and blogs and newsletters, I’ve been subscribing to their emails or (more typically) their RSS feeds to cobble together My Internet. All the neat corners of the web, containing all the information I care about related to my interests and my hobbies, as well as reputable news sources. My RSS reader (and to a lesser extent my email inbox) is now my social media, just like it was back in 2002. So not long ago, I deleted the social media apps and any free-time scrolling was limited to just my RSS feed.
People, I got fucking bored. I had to end up reading a really long article I saved for myself a few months ago. It took me 40 minutes to read. It had multiple, complex points. It was well-reasoned. It gave me a more nuanced view. It was marvelous. If nothing else, this approach has shifted my time away from lots of short, empty dopamine hits to longer, more intellectually ‘nutritious’ reading.
It’s not a complete replacement. Unless a friend has a site or similar, they don’t show up in my RSS feed. Of course, algorithms pushed a lot of my friends out of my social media feed over the years. (The comfort social media provided to some to share to some abhorrent views forced me to remove others.) And while I’ve deleted the apps from my devices, I’ve not deleted the accounts. For better or worse, memories were made on those networks that AI models can now use for training. And you never know when you might want to revisit past haunts.
So what’s this blog for, then? Well, the outbound posts. I’ll probably limit it to one a day, though, probably as a string of random thoughts or things I’ve learned or found interesting throughout the day. We’ll see.