I was on Twitter for a couple of years, but I never took it seriously. The best thing about it was reading posts from people like Bree Newsome, the Nap Bishop, and Katie Mack. But it also kind of sucked because the platform encourages everyone to interact like celebrities and/or shitposters. It never held the sort of intimate space of actually knowing other people that Facebook had in its heyday, at least for me. But I joined when I was already learning to hold social media at arm’s length.
My son is not on any mass-social-media platform at all, and I’m glad that works for him. Communities of choice (like Ravelry, Discord, old-school forums, even subreddits) can be unhealthy too, but can be moderated. The site I spend the most time on is Metafilter, a community link-posting-and-discussion site that dates back over 20 years. Unlike most users there, I’ve always posted under my real name, so I’m easy to find.
I’m trying to intentionally get away from doomscrolling and dopamine-drip browsing, and part of that is to use my time on the computer more for thinking and writing and less for endless checking on what new posts pop up.
I miss the old days of finding web sites that were continually updated, that I could visit once a day or once a week to catch up on. Like The Sneeze, that was a classic. Or Seanbaby or X-Entertainment or Cockeyed. Webcomics, flash cartoons, and dumb blogs. This is the internet I want to return to. And I plan to do my part by not posting updates to Facebook or shitposts to Twitter. I will put all those things here, whether anybody reads them or not.