Honestly, I have been fed up with social media for some time, it makes me feel deeply lonely. I spend hours just doom scrolling, and there’s only one way to change that: don’t give myself access.
Once upon a time I believed in the community that social media brought but that seemed to start disappearing when I was working in school (so before 2020), and attempts at reconnecting with that community just never went anywhere. I also used social media more as a journey, but social media now wants the finished thing after the finished thing, and the process isn’t as useful unless you have a complete video of the process from start to finish.
I also find social media asides doom scrolling it also causes me a lot of anxiety I just want to make my things and enjoy that process without having a camera pointed at me all the time.
Unsociable Media the few apps I have left
I still have the meta business suit in case I want to post, but you can’t scroll through that constantly.
WhatsApp Business has a single chat in I can’t access elsewhere. Zoom I don’t use, but you know.
That leaves WordPress and Jetpack, which I use to manage websites like this one. In fact I only installed them this morning.
My goal is to actually post more regularly here on the blog if I can type away in the evening while I sit with my other half. And then, on a work day, actually edit them to make some sense.
My Feedly feed, where one person has 27 new posts and all 176 posts are by 19 people
I wish the internet was like it was, but it isn’t. Having everything in one place of an endless scroll with adverts and decreasing reach killed it. This morning, I logged into my Feedly account I haven’t logged in in years (I forgot what I was using as a reader, in fact), and of the over 400 blogs I used to subscribe to, it would appear only 19 are still active and produced any sort of new posts recently. I used Feedly because I used to use the Google Reader, and then they got rid of that, then moved to the old reader but they wanted to charge and etc. I also had RSS feeds set up for other things on my browser, but I can’t say I have used those in years, either.
My goal is to mainly work in this corner of the internet, not doomscroll and just get words on paper as it were.
I know a lot of blogs have moved to Substack in an attempt to monetise and reach a bigger audience, but I don’t want to charge people to read the nonsense I write, and then my blog isn’t here, and there is no easy way to simultaneously post to both places. So that’s out for me.