Slowly Stepping Away From Social Media

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.

Continue reading

Twitter Continues Circling The Digital Drain

Amidst everything else going on in the world, I’ve been watching Twitter continue to circle the drain. It’s nothing new, for the most part, but it’s still depressing to see it happening. More bills left unpaid, the slow degredation of basic features, the shifts in company policy that aren’t really shifts so much as the company’s owner desperately trying anything to keep people worshipping him, and then, mostly recently, the restriction of accounts to viewing a set number of tweets each day. The latest of these, the 600-tweets-viewable-per-day thing, caused a big stir and the biggest drop in Twitter activity I’ve seen. Now, thanks to the number of people using the site less (myself included), there’s fewer posts, less activity on those posts, and a growing desperation to find something new. A lot of people seem to be moving to bluesky, but the recent release of “Threads: an Instagram App” seems to have complicated matters. By which I mean that it seems to have claimed pretty much everyone looking to move with some notable exceptions, though I suppose we’ll see if they stay or move on the next time something new comes out.

Continue reading