Minimal Social Media User

Twitter was once so damn cool. And I'm not going to say anything about Elon. If we're being honest, Twitter was broken long before Space Karen took over. What Elon's takeover of Twitter/X did do, however, was make many people look at how they allowed social media into their lives. I know, since I'm one of them.

Back in the mid-00's, when there was a new social network seemingly every week, and people went to SXSW to see what new app would take over the world, I was constantly excited about where the social web was going to go. Twitter, Facebook (though admittedly, FB came earlier), Four Square, StumbleUpon, Digg, and so many more came out between 2004 and 2010. People had these great ideas about how we could all come together online and build communities.

Social media was a good idea. The world is too big for people to only be locally social. Living just in your hometown, isolates you towards other's views and the happenings of the wider world.

The problem is that humans suck and ruin everything they touch.

The Downfall of the Social Web

I think it honestly all started with Facebook. I know we all like to think Twitter is the thing that killed social media, but it's not. Facebook was once this thing that was great at allowing real friends and real family to keep in contact with each other. Then people started to "friend" people they never met, and the meaning of friend changed to include someone who followed your profile.

No longer did you have to know the people who were on your Facebook. And I know that I just said that social media was great at expanding our horizons beyond our little bubbles, but it also warped our sense of humanity and what it means to have real relationships.

As Facebook tried to become bigger and bigger, it needed its users to stop being focused on family and friends only. So, they pushed to widen what content you saw in their "newsfeed", made it less about the people closest to you and more about things posted by others who were really outside your social circle. This changed the nature of what Facebook once was, and started the slow decline of social media.

They introduced groups, and ideally this is where your social web would expand while your profile stayed local, but it never really happened that way. People went to groups and that became their place of interaction.

Other social sites saw this, and sought to emulate. Twitter and Instagram were the "town square" supposedly, but really were just echo chambers for whatever was 'trending'. The substance was lost, since there was no humanity in it. You can yell a lot at someone you disagree with in real life, maybe say nasty things, but you pose the risk of getting punched in the nose. On Twitter, you can be a horrible person, be anonymous, and then go about your day like you weren't being an asshole.

As we became more anonymous with each other, our humanity slipped away. Some people don't see this. They're still in the doom-scrolling stage, where they need to see the trending topics of the day. They need to be outraged with everyone else over the latest nonsense. They've become addicted to it.

And that's what social sites hoped for. Facebook, X, Instagram, TikTok, they all want you to spend as much time on their apps as possible because it makes them more money. The more outraged you are, the more engaged you'll become. Your mental health means nothing to them.

Addicted to Social Media

I was this person. I wanted to be in the know about everything. I used to throw a fit if the app I was using lost my scroll position on Twitter – always fearful of missing out on a tweet that might be super important. I would spend hours scrolling on Instagram looking at images of who knows what, simply because it was a non-thinking way to waste time.

I got rid of Instagram and Twitter (moved to Mastodon), and that was good. But TikTok stuck around. I didn't see it as harmful, since I thought I got value out of it. But it was just like the rest. It was only doing the wrap ups for this blog that I realized that I spent too much time on TikTok.

My social media habits have changed over the years as I have become more cognizant of how it has effected not only myself, but the Internet as a whole. It has been a process.

Social Minimalism

With the demise of TikTok, my social app folder is quite bare. I have Mastodon and Reddit. That's it. I spend a little time on Reddit each week, but mostly just a scroll through Unixporn. And most of my other Reddit stuff comes through RSS, which I mostly ignore.

I spend more time on Mastodon. But it doesn't seem unhealthy. I don't care if I miss something. It doesn't matter what's trending. I'm on there because I've made good friends there. Yes, online friends, but friends nonetheless. On the Fediverse, I have actual interactions and conversations, whereas on Twitter all I ever did was shout into the void. I feel like I get something human out of the Fediverse, which isn't a feeling I ever got from Twitter or any other social app.

But that's it. I want to be as minimal in my digital social life as it is possible to be. I think this is healthy. It has definitely made me think about different ways of spending my time. It has got me blogging more, which has, I think, led to some personal growth.

Can I cut back more? Maybe. Reddit could go away, and I wouldn't miss much at all. I would miss the Fediverse, so that will stay in my life in some form or fashion. But I'm much more thoughtful now about how I interact with social media. I also think others are seeing this too, and that can only be a good thing.

This is part of 30 in 30, my attempt to blog every day for a whole month.