Time spent on social media platforms peaked in 2022 and has since gone into steady decline, especially among teens and twentysomethings
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I started using social media to connect with friends and family, old and new, and to interact with the humans in my local community.
But those people are buried under a pile of ads, scams, and “suggestions” about shit I don’t care about.
Not to mention the absolutely wild privacy violations on an ongoing and increasingly dystopian basis.
Because you’re now interacting with unhinged strangers or unhinged family members and no one wants to deal with that in their daily lives.
This isn’t like the days of Myspace or early Facebook or even old PHP forums where you essentially chose who you interacted with and in turn selected who could interact with you. But it’s also the fact, at least for me personally, I just don’t want to share all the details that go on in my life anymore with everyone. It used to be I could post something personal online and only the people I trusted or very close friends could see it and thats who I wanted to see it. I didn’t want my Parents to stumble across the fact that a girl I was dating had a weird/unique fetish or whatever. Once my parents got on Facebook then it was over.
Social media is fine when you’re allowed to keep it within a contained, personal, and customized environment. Once you open the flood gates and allow EVERYONE into your life you might as well be screaming on a street corner about what you had for breakfast.
Constantly having the right-wing views of weapons grade cunts shoved into your eyeballs will do that.
I’m in my 60s. Posting on social media mostly isn’t fun any more, and I don’t really want to put more money in the hands of billionnaire fascists. So Facebook, Reddit and Twitter are gone (I’ve had to keep Messenger as I have friends who only communicate using that platform) and I’ve never bothered with TikTok, Instagram or Snapchat anyway. This platform and Bluesky are the only ones left and I’m mostly a lurker anyway.
This place feels a low key where you can share conversations. It feels somewhat genuine.
I don’t feel l am being marketed too or being used as a tool here.
add to the fact that these platforms are still relatively small so I can recognize usernames thus making it feel more personal I suppose?
Also I run my own instances of everything in the fediverse so I have more control of what and whom I want to see/hear from. If you’re a person I don’t agree with and have negative opinions then I can easily block you from everything.
It is largely unpleasant, deliberately unrewarding yet addictive, occasionally punished, politically slanted towards billionaires, and a privacy nightmare. If anything it’s a testament to the human desire for connection that we’ve used it this long.
Antisocial media
