Over my little break from work (which I say a little tongue-in-cheek because 12 consecutive days away from work is the longest break I’ve taken in years other than my trip to Spain which I’m excluding since that was fun but definitely not a break and also because 12 days isn’t really that much of a break considering a third of those days where weekend days and a third of those days were holidays), I stopped using most social media. I pushed myself to log on at least once a day to share my blog posts and would occasionally find myself browising Cohost to see what was going on, but I think I spent maybe a total of an hour on Bluesky, Facebook, and Cohost combined over that period. I’m not saying that I miraculously found my lost ability to focus or that I somehow managed to break free of the grip that social media has on my brain, just that I didn’t really wind up in a position where I felt like checking out social media. The times I did feel like checking it made it abundantly clear to me that social media is only for when I’m bored and tired. If I’m just tired, I’ll usually just keep doing whatever I’m doing since I rarely let being tired stop me from doing things (which, honestly, is probably not super healthy for me given the way it impacts my bedtime). If I was bored, I usually just pushed myself away from wherever I was sitting and found something new to do (since I’ve liberally sprinkled my apartment with various forms of entertainment). Only the two combined could push me to check social media since I didn’t have the willpower to push myself to move on to a new thing and I was too bored with what I was already doing to continue doing it.

It was kind of nice, all said and done. I don’t really feel like I missed much, since everyone was busy with their family or friends and its not like I didn’t use my various chatting applications to stay in touch with people (which I’m not counting as social media since most social media stopped being about having actual conversations years ago at this point). I have started using them a bit more again, now that I’m back at work and now occasionally need something to break up my work with a couple minutes of attention grabbing whatever, but I think my usage is still down. I’m definitely more targeted in my use, at least, since most of the time I’m just logging on to whatever site to check up on a specific person, look for specific posts (since I like to engage with the posts of my favorite artists and comic creators), or accomplish a specific task. It makes for more frequent but much, much shorter trips. There’s nothing wrong with that, mind you, but it has made me feel the bounds I’ve created around my various social media accounts more than I used to.

While I’ve long-since purged my Twitter account (something I did back in 2017 just to get some peace of mind), I’ve spent most of the last two years trying to reduce my other accounts to something that felt more reasonable and that was actually focused around things I cared about. This made Facebook incredibly unusable, since now my entire feed is about ninety percent advertisements and suggested posts since the site’s algorithm is alternatingly convinced my account of a decade and a half at least is brand new or that its inactive, so its difficult to actually see the stuff my relatively few friends post. I’m in a similar hole with Instagram since I don’t really follow people there or use the site much aside from following a couple friends who are more art-focused (and one who actually uses the site a lot). Cohost is pretty nice, as far as up-and-coming social media sites go, but I often wind up unfollowing people not long after I follow them because the glimpse I caught that convinced me to follow them was either not representative of the kind of posting they do or they post so much that I can’t find anyone else I’ve followed. Bluesky feels the most relaxed, but it also feels like a lot of people checked it out and then gave up immediately when it wasn’t performing exactly like Twitter had before it began to disentagrate under the management of its current owner.

So there really isn’t much out there for me other than the few Discords I’m already in, Facebook Messenger which too many people use as their only reliable method of communication for me to abandon, and the few people I still text. And, you know, here. I wouldn’t count most of those as social media, even they’re all the ways that I maintain my social connections. I miss the old days, when you could still connect with people, when there weren’t algorithms pointing everyone towards outrage farms, and when you could still link out to external websites without your post getting pretty effectively hidden by alogorithms that are only tweaked to prevent people from leaving the website rather than deplatforming hate, literal nazis, and those who are abusing their power and positions to damage the world to their benefit. Life WAS better on social media back in the day. I’ll admit that it still wasn’t actually good or anything, but it’s a pretty low bar to be better than social media today. Honestly, given the state of things, I feel more like I should miss social media than that I actually miss it these days…