Recently, I decided to delete Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok from my phone. It was a conscious choice I had to make after experiencing an anxious meltdown last week. Reddit wasn’t any better for me, and we all know where that place is headed. I haven’t deleted my accounts yet, but prioritizing the loss of easy access to those sites was important.
As usual, I feel better now. A lot of the content on those platforms brings me hateful and unpleasant feelings. It’s addicting, like a mess you just can’t seem to take your eyes off of. I had to be honest with myself and accept the truth that profit-driven social media has a net-negative impact on my life.
I’m glad I’m here now. I’ll never stop repeating this until it becomes untrue (hopefully not), but I enjoy being here. I don’t see this place as an alternative to anywhere else. It’s helping me break the habit of skipping long paragraphs of text and only relying on article titles at face value. The nuance present in several discussions feels more human.
Anyway, enough about me. How have your experiences been with other social media platforms? How do they compare to Beehaw?
Good on you for taking the steps to try and remove the sources of your anxiety from your life. Social media is certainly addicting and it’s a hard cycle to break free from.
I’ve been slowly deleting my social media and other internet accounts for a few years now. Facebook was the first to go probably half a decade ago now. I bailed Twitter around a year before Musk took over. I stopped using my Twitch account but I still need to delete it. I am in the process of weaning myself off of YouTube.
I started this process mostly due to privacy concerns and me feeling out of control of my personal information. Algorithms served to further push me away because I struggle not to engage with depressing topics which results in controversial and depressing content being pushed on me by the algorithm which severely affected my mental health. The final straw is all these platforms becoming almost completely unusable due to their need to feed the illusion of constantly growing profits by adding unnecessary new features that bloat the platform, adding ever more intrusive adverts, and locking features behind paid subscriptions.
These days I only use Mastodon and Lemmy. I also have a subscription to Nebula through CuriosityStream which has been scratching my YouTube itch so I’m aiming to delete my Google account completely soon. I also use Discord, just for keeping in contact with friends, but ultimately I’d like to bail from that platform too.
Ultimately this decision has freed up a lot more personal time for myself to pursue my existing hobbies and new ones. Overall I am much happier.