On Quitting Corporate Social Media
It’s interesting that we can stop using a website that is so integral to our lives for years. During the pandemic I quit facebook because I was flamed and trolled at a time when I needed friendship and support. Facebook has been known to make people depressed. During lockdown I decided to quit Facebook and Instagram.
Quitting FB and IG
I quit them for two reasons. The first is that I no longer got anything positive out of them. I saw plenty of junk, I felt isolated, and they were promoting things that polarised my sense of missing out. It was healthier just to quit both. I wouldn’t be reminded of my pandemic solitude if I wasn’t seeing pictures of people with their families and friends whilst I was keeping safe from COVID.
Quitting Twitter
The first time I quit, and deleted my twitter account was in 2007 or 2008, right before the RTS, at the time TSR, asked to interview me about Twitter. I recreated my account, and then stuck around for the next twelve or more years.
With Twitter I wanted an alternative forever. I disliked that the site was focused on the cult of personality, spam hashtags and people marketing and promoting, rather than conversing. I still argue about hashtags on the Fediverse, and I’m tempted to quit it, if hashtags become more important than conversations.
Morality and Noise
Twitter was usable until Musk changed the timeline to promote junk, rather than chronological tweets. People love to ask, “but how will people see my tweets if I don’t use hashtags?”. The answer is simple. Devote time to the network. If you devote time your tweets, toots, notes and more will appear more often, especially if you have conversations.
The issue with Twitter is that it lost track of the chronological timeline and tried to recommend tweets that were 24hrs old, that were popular, that would guarantee that you were ignored if you responded. This is one of my key reasons for blocking verified years ago. I didn’t want to see tweets that, if I engaged with them, would see me be ignored. That’s just noise, but it’s also emotionally draining.
Social media is not just for married people sitting on a toilet alone, killing a few minutes of solitude. For some people social media is their social life, so the more disengaged the community is, the more worthless the network. That’s why people stay on FB, and hesitate to leave Twitter. They don’t want to be alone.
Twitter swung to the Right. More and more disinformation was spread. I felt the need to be anonymous, and even to hide my tweets from public view, long before came to Twitter, but I left when I saw him doing to twitter, what made me quit Instagram. Taking over the timeline, and making it impossible to converse with the small social circle I was in the habit of talking with.
The Unique Selling Point that kept me on Twitter was lost.
The Lost Habits
For 3400 days I posted on Instagram every day, or almost every day. I only changed my habit because the photo sharing app that I used to share images became a signal of solitude and isolation, during lockdown. Instead of feeling closer to people I felt more and more isolated. I was sharing images that were being ignored, unliked. That’s when I decided that I might as well post them to my blog instead. The rational was that if I was going to create content, I might as well be the person to benefit from it.
For years Facebook was the network where I chatted with uni friends and colleagues. When friends and colleagues were no longer appearing in my timeline, and I was trolled and flamed by strangers, during lockdown, I quit. The sense of community was destroyed, and the allure of blogging seemed more interesting.
I left Twitter for moral reasons. What made my emigration from Twitter to the fediverse a success was the community. The mistake that Twitter made was to drive people away when an alternative solution already existed. For once there was a critical mass of people, fleeing from Twitter, to the fediverse, for the fediverse to grab people’s attention and devotion. Interest might be a better word.
The Alternative
I have now been blogging daily for 247 days. In that time I have often shared a daily photo or more, with the blog posts. I have replaced Facebook and Instagram with blogging. The beauty of blogging is that I’m creating content for my site, practicing my writing skills, and getting used to elaborating on ideas. I have a healthy blogging routine, rather than wasting time on FB and IG.
I have replaced Twitter with the Fediverse and the advantage of the Fediverse is that you have a multitude of communities on a number of servers. This means that if you don’t like one community, you can change from one instance to another. You also have the option of writing long posts on the fediverse. You can treat it as a web forum rather than a microblogging platform. You can elaborate, and you can share essays, if you are so inclined.
On Twitter people always said “I don’t want to blog because then people have to click away from Twitter to read my post, and they won’t”. With the fediverse people don’t have to click away. Your blog can be native to the Fediverse. Mine is. If people choose to “read more” they can read the entire post, and comment without signing in.
Blogging in the fediverse is seamless.
And Finally
When I gave up on Facebook, and when I gave up on Twitter I felt that I was isolating myself more than ever, by leaving the two communities, but now, with the growth of the fediverse I feel that the opposite is true. By leaving the networks where I was competing with algorithms to be noticed, I have joined social networks where chronological timelines reward those who converse the most, rather than those that just post once a day, with a hashtag. I see plenty of people posting, sometimes with no links, no images, and no hashtags. It’s pure conversation, and I like that. That’s how social networks should be.
