Recently, I decided to delete Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok from my phone. It was a conscious choice I had to make after experiencing an anxious meltdown last week. Reddit wasn’t any better for me, and we all know where that place is headed. I haven’t deleted my accounts yet, but prioritizing the loss of easy access to those sites was important.

As usual, I feel better now. A lot of the content on those platforms brings me hateful and unpleasant feelings. It’s addicting, like a mess you just can’t seem to take your eyes off of. I had to be honest with myself and accept the truth that profit-driven social media has a net-negative impact on my life.

I’m glad I’m here now. I’ll never stop repeating this until it becomes untrue (hopefully not), but I enjoy being here. I don’t see this place as an alternative to anywhere else. It’s helping me break the habit of skipping long paragraphs of text and only relying on article titles at face value. The nuance present in several discussions feels more human.

Anyway, enough about me. How have your experiences been with other social media platforms? How do they compare to Beehaw?

  • First off, congrats on breaking free. I was a twitter user from 2010 to 2019 and a facebook user from 2011 to 2019. I was on reddit from 2015 to 2023. I gave up fb and twitter for in order to only use mastodon and reddit in 2019. I personally found reddit impossible to get away from due to its community nature. However, now thanks to lemmy i have done it finally. Reddit was the last to go and hitting that delete button felt amazing