anti-social
Last week I found myself browsing a lot more social media than usual. Mostly I keep to Mastodon, which seems mostly a pleasant place to be. Last week I discovered I still had a Threads account that was tied to an Instagram account I never post to. So I started browsing Threads. Then I started browsing BlueSky.
Pretty soon I found I was craving and ingesting massive amounts of Threads, BlueSky and Instagram posts. A lot of these posts were of a political nature and I found myself getting in equal parts stressed, angry and combative.
It all came to a head last weekend when I was following posts on all three networks about the masked men blocking the Port of Dover and another group of angry masked men causing violent disruption in Portsmouth (due to a boatload of people arriving at the coast).
Things felt bleak. I was getting anxious and angry about things I had zero control over. I popped over to Mastodon and only one person in my feed had mentioned the Dover blockade to literally no interaction from their followers.
Then and there I decided that I would limit my use of social media back to just Mastodon and an infrequent check on the music acts I follow on Instagram.
This week my mental health has been far better. I've been less anxious abd felt less hopeless. I knew social media (too much social media) is bad for you, but this just brought it home how bad it is.
Having been used to using a social media platform with a time-based feed (Mastodon) and then going over to ones where The Algorithm decides what you see makes you realise how much what you see is controlled by that algorithm. It's insidious and terrifying and it's easy to not be aware of it if you've not experienced a platform without it.
I think I will steer clear of Threads and Bluesky for a while, I can see how addictive and dangerous they are.