Using any and all social media feels like crap these days. Very little of it is interesting or particularly engaging. I’ve made little traction with making new friends on places that aren’t Twitter (still not going to call it the new thing) and most of the sites I’m on look like they’re speed-running the whole rise and fall of every social media site from the last two decades. One is struggling to remain afloat as they adhere to their values over what sometimes seems like good sense or reasonable planning (which is a criticism, but I mostly like when they do this so it’s difficult to really fault them for it outside of one or two specific instances where they probably should have seen a problem coming) and another is being filled to the brim with people who will just tell you that you’re wrong, without any evidence, about everything from your own life events, basic facts about the world, and your expressed emotions.

It’s increasingly exhausting to be on the internet at all, which is awful because that it still my main connection to pretty much all of my friends. Even the ones who live nearby are mostly people I interact with via the internet since most of use aren’t super close together and my work schedule means I have very little free time that overlaps with them. Without social media and the convenient connection it provides me and my friends, I wouldn’t talk to anyone but coworkers most days. Even with social media, I barely talk to anyone other than coworkers. After all, every single social media app or website is getting worse to use and it certainly doesn’t help what feels like my fraying social connections that most of said connections are built on me, specifically, putting in the effort to stay in contact and that I no longer have the time or energy to put into being the primary driver of social contact with my distant friends.

Probably the worst culprit right now (at least in regards to how I feel about social media as a whole) is the storm of people on Bluesky who seem to exist for the sole purpose of showing up in the replies to even mildly popular accounts and telling someone that they’re wrong. There will be no evidence provided, contrary evidence to their thoughts will be ignored, and even matters of opinion will be dismissed by this invader as if their own thoughts are iron-clad while the best evidence another person can offer is as flimsy as air. I’ve seen a bunch of people that I like driven offline by these people who left them feeling like just not participating was the only way they could get away from this endless harassment. Which, mind you, is only one of the many forms of harassment that show up there, these days. Now that the site is open to anyone who wishes to create an account, the experience has gotten so much worse. Not that it was always great in the early days, but it was certainly easier to have a pleasant time and any problems you ran into were usually smaller. You could block your way out of just about anything. Nowadays, it takes so much more work to get the same result and there’s plenty of people angry enough about whatever pointless thing they’ve decided to make your problem that have one or more alternate accounts they can use to push their narrative or carry on their arguments once you’ve blocked them and the motivation to keep making more just to spite you. It almost never happens to me because I’m not popular and tend to quietly lurk more than post, but it’s exhausting to see the same thing happen over and over again.

Cohost, at least, still feels pretty comfortable to occupy (and continues to grow more so as I try to expand the group of people I follow), but it feels difficult to really connect with people there without digging super deeply into the tags and trying to start conversations with strangers constantly (many of which won’t reply much beyond the first two back-and-forth replies if you try to have a proper conversation). All of which I just do not have the time or energy for, these days. I’ve got enough time to scroll a bit, maybe like some stuff or reply a little bit, and then move on. I love that Cohost allows for bigger posts and there’s nothing quite like a Cohost Essay (a massive, sprawling treatise on a topic of special interest to the original poster), but it’s difficult to find old stuff unless you know exactly what you’re looking for, whether you’re looking for something you’ve already encountered or are hoping to find someone’s past work without having to click through every page of their account’s posts. As a result, if you miss it, it is probably gone forever. Unless someone else does the work of finding it and shares it again, in which case you’ve got another shot at it. It makes it incredibly difficult to avoid the feeling that you need to keep checking the site every so often, which can be a little stressful or anxiety inducing at times. Other than that and the fact that the platform might implode due to a lack of money since the creators won’t take venture capital money to fund it (which I like) and have failed to come up with a workable plan to fund the site with the site itself (which sucks given how heavily they were betting on doing that), it’s a great place to be most of the time.

Other than those two, all the rest of social media is a miasma of disappointment. Facebook is too full of advertisements to ever be worth using. Instagram is impossible to use unless you download the app and give it more permissions than I’m comfortable with. My list of friends I chat with on Messenger is growing ever smaller, thanks to the growing distance between me and my friends due to my increasing exhaustion and their lack of conversation initiation. Even Discord, a place I once hoped to find friends and fun, has slowly turned into a frustrating endeavor to avoid getting tangled up in drama (or requires even more time and attention than Cohost to stay on top of what’s happening in the communities I’m interesting in being a part of). Sure, I can still have my fun and get a little bit of enjoyment out of all of those things, but the amount I get is rapidly dwindling and I’ve found no replacements for it yet. Not that I have the time and attention for that, though, given that work has me busier than ever during the week days and I’m usually too tired to stare at my phone on the weekends outside of the time I spend reading webcomics (the number of those that I follow has also shrunk, too, over the past few years). I can tell the place social media–and the internet as a whole–had in my life is shrinking and, so far, nothing has grown to replace it other than work. Someday, I’ll be working less and I won’t know what to do with myself because all the people I’d hoped would try to stay connected have fallen silent and all the places I used to share little parts of my self and my time will have disappeared into the enshitification of the internet. I’ll probably read more, so that’s not a super big problem conceptually, but I think I’ll probably also be more lonely than I am even now and THAT thought is the one that makes me nervous about the future…