#I now use tumblr Bluesky and discord instead of Facebook Twitter and Instagram

[sertralinegremlin]

Kinda wild that the Trumptruck capers have resulted in me pivoting my social media habits to the way they were in 2012

[warmcupoftea]

2025 is definitely starting off way differently than I thought, and I can't say it's in a bad way.

My resolutions weren't many, but I seem to have created new ones I wasn't expecting.

Deleting my social media off my phone wasn't something I was expecting, especially since it really did have its hooks into me. TIKTOK ESPECIALLY! I would easily spend up to 4 or more hours a day on that thing!!! I really had a problem. The seemingly imminent ban of Tiktok really started this domino effect for me. In my mind I was like "well, it seems like the ban is serious this time, maybe I need to start cutting the cord with it and dealing with whatever emotions that brings now instead of the day of." So I deleted it.

At first, embarrassingly, I found myself immediately swiping over to its former spot in my socials folder to open it, despite it not being there anymore. But as the day went along, I started feeling better quicker than I'd thought. I quit wanting it. To be honest, ditching cigarettes felt similar. Once I'd removed my access to it, I didn't want it. Part of it might be a weird sense of laziness. I don't want to go into the app store and redownload that and re-log in. I don't want to take that trip to the convenience store to spend money on another pack of cigarettes.

Next I deleted things like Bluesky. I just wasn't using that enough to warrant the storage being taken up on my stupid little brick. Twitter came soon after that. That one, I was slightly less addicted to than the cursed clock app. But addicted nonetheless.

Soon enough, I only had Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Discord, and Tumblr.

Tumblr soon replaced Tiktok in terms of my mindless scrolling. To be fair, I had been completely hooked on it since I was 11 going on 12. So it was just going from one addiction to a more familiar one of the past. I'd scroll ALLLLLL the way down until I was seeing old posts from several hours ago, refresh, then repeat.

I realized this was a problem at 2am when melatonin decided it was finished keeping me asleep through the night. I couldn't get back to sleep, so my brain thought its only option was to do the old Tumblr song and dance.

I then asked myself what the hell I was doing scrolling and scrolling and whatever at 2AM. I know it's pretty much normalized nowadays to throw away your sleep schedule for Tumblr and TikTok like a snot rag, but I really just had to ask myself "You're really doing this instead of AT LEAST closing your eyes?" Getting some form of rest? Tumblr is the first thing you reached for?

SO I set up a queue long enough for 50 days, and deleted Tumblr too. Then I said "oh what the hell, let's go with almost everything else too."

SO I got rid of everything except Instagram (it has been impossible for me to become addicted to that app. It really just cannot get me for some reason. I like checking it every now and again, but meh), Discord (I only have that for family and one or two friends to be entirely honest. And even then it's days or even weeks in between replies), and Pinterest (love Pinterest. Social media without the social. Just pretty images).

I didn't expect to love it so much immediately. I wasn't expecting to feel better so soon. Sure, I still swipe for that little blue square to open every now and again. But life is so much better like this. Life is so much better when the Internet is pretty much going back to being that one special place allocated to one area of your house, where you get to leave it pretty much all behind once you step outside that room, outside your house.

I still have YouTube, and plan to stop watching stupid slop content. I want to shift to more beneficial content like self help and learning new things. But that's about it really.

I can't wait to leave more internet behind me.

[stevensaus]

As this current wave of people have been leaving the rampant fascism actively being pushed by Musk on X, many people have ended up on Bluesky. I've also seen people finally getting fed up with Meta's tampering with the main timeline and doing the same. Which, y'know, is cool. Bluesky is a hell of a lot better than X or Facebook. You can find me there at @stevensaus.com or alternately, follow my Mastodon account at @StevenSaus.faithcollapsing.com.ap.brid.gy. However, I've also seen others be wary of enshittification. If you aren't familiar with the term, take a moment and read the linked Wired article from Corey Doctorow. TL;DR: profit-seeking makes things worse as companies shift from serving the users to serving the investors. Bluesky may feel different now, but so did Twitter then. What's to prevent it from happening again? Nothing. This is the tradeoff you make when you use someone else's service that's being run with an expectation of making a profit. Whether through the consumption of ads on the site or through making purchasing ad space a requirement to reach your audience, any for-profit company is highly incentivized to... well, make a profit. That's not inherently bad; it is very possible to make a sustainable profit and not completely enshittify something. But that's not what typically happens. Instead, corporations tend to focus on maximizing profits, particularly in the short run. That combination is what really slams the gas pedal down on the enshittification process. Whether it's shrinkflation or predatory inflation or shoving ads in your face or not letting you see what grandma posted because she didn't spend money to , the net result of enshittification remains. So what are you to do? For people who are mostly just being social and consumers, I would make sure that, aside from having good blocking tools, whatever service(s) you use have the ability for you to export your data easily, and migrate servers if possible. Both Mastodon and Bluesky allow this (though "selfhosting" Bluesky doesn't mean quite the same thing it does for Mastodon). Aside from making multiple accounts, you can use RSS feeds to get user feeds from Bluesky or Mastodon natively; there are services that claim to be able to do so with Threads. The ideal solution would be something like Mastodon, but even moreso, where there are many, many, many individual instances. But that does require some degree of technical expertise, and a lot of folx either don't have the know-how or the time or energy to set something like that up. Community servers -- like wandering.shop -- are a compromise, but rely on donated funds and time (for moderation). Failing that, the next best thing would be an app (or apps) to combine the feeds of multiple services into one (or one interface). I would love a deck-style app (or even better, a TUI) where you can have a column for Mastodon, a column for Threads, a column for Bluesky, a column for Tumblr etc. It's probably feasible at this point in time, but I'm unaware of such a tool as of yet. For producers -- those of us who write blogs, create art, or otherwise share "content" in one form or another -- you cannot have your primary online identity be any social media site that you do not control. Plain and simple. Just like how this blog post is being pushed/posted to Tumblr, LinkedIn, Medium, Mastodon, FB, and Bluesky. Even if the full text is at those sites, the original can always be found at the blog itself. If someone followed me on X, they'll now find my account is fully deactivated there... but they can still find me here, always. Not only does this protect you from a service going toxic overall like X has, but it also means you're not as hurt if you get caught by an overzealous moderation bot that doesn't give you a reason for why you've had your account restricted. It's happened to me on G+, Discord, Threads, Instagram, TikTok, and Pintrest. Many of those I do not know what I supposedly did wrong and cannot

get an answer from the service; for Threads and Insta, they claim the weekly flash fiction challenge site is a spam/scam site, even though I've jumped through the hoops to verify it. It can be a pain in the rear to do it this way -- I still have to post to Bluesky manually, for example, at least for now -- but overall it's worth it. That reduces the "sunk costs" of being on any particular service for both you and your followers. https://ideatrash.net/2024/11/trying-to-escape-the-cycle-of-enshittification.html?feed_id=491&_unique_id=673bc82083f97