another refugee has joined the camp
It seems every first or second post on this platform has to be about social media, and this post is no different. Today I made the decision to delete the last remaining social media account I used which I have been contemplating for a few weeks by now. It wasn’t an easy decision as it meant losing connections I had built over months (some even over years), but I had to do it for the sake of my mental health. Even the newcomers (Bluesky and Mastodon) weren’t a good fit for me. They retained some of the worst aspects of their Big Tech counterpart(s): numbers and algorithms. While Mastodon did so to a lesser extent, it still had too much noise and offered the opportunity to doomscroll.
I don’t think the human brain is adapted to hearing so many people’s short thoughts, especially out of context. It’s just not how we’ve historically communicated with each other. I like to compare X/Twitter and its alternatives (but also every kind of algorithmic and/or short form platform out there) to us standing each on our own rooftop and shouting stuff collectively at each other. It is so overwhelming. Despite the sensory overload, the one thing that has kept me going back was the ability to easily discover like-minded people. Whether that made forming a community any easier is another matter altogether.
Seeing the Grizzly Gazette on the Bearblog Discover feed convinced me to make a decision on getting my own blog. The blog’s name as well as the writers’ stated goals with it remind me of a 19th century English town making their first newspaper to update the fellow townspeople on the latest hot topics and trends. I’ve never seen a platform that had anything this iconic. Who knows, I might want to join them one day ;)