I believe most of you know some of the most popular social media. That is for example: Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (I am not gonna say the re-branded name). Now you may say: "What Facebook? Are you 65?". Well firstly NO and secondly it is still one of the most commonly used messaging platforms.
Recently I have heard a nice joke about that. Facebook is like a cemetery, everyone has someone in there. I feel like I could perhaps share my own experience with actually leaving social media.
A few years back, when I was actually a teenager I just had to be on Facebook, and Instagram, taht is what popular kids do, right? Later on I was trying to answer what is the reason behind that. I would now say that it is due to the need to be in some social group. Because it is a nice tool which makes it so easy to talk to someone and keep in touch. Which is quite contradictory to the real impact, isn't it?
I actually never got used to using Instagram. I feel like sending (mostly) pictures to a wide group of so-called friends is not my cup of tea. I tend to have closer friends and friends which I don't talk to that much. And yes also some weirdos could see my pictures on Instagram. Why would I share my real life pictures with all of them? I know that you can have a private profile, but that doesn't stop your friends showing pictures to others.
I might sound old-fashioned, but I would prefer to share pictures from my life with people on my own. I will send my family a pictrue from a nice hike which they can also try or send my friends a random meme-material picture which I stumbled upon.
Therefore I ditched Instagram a long time ago and yet I have never needed to come back. Some friends are trying to convince me by showing me some of their reels. I couldn't see myself scrolling through this garbage (but I must say it is some sort of cute and funny garbage, which is a nice trap).
But wait I still sometimes send pictures on my Bluesky account. Oh yeah, you caught me, or did you? On the other hand, it is in a small amount and mostly it is about the message and not the picture itself.
Tik T.. don't care
Are you using TikTok? Why? I don't get it. It is just a piece of crap. I am seeing some guys scrolling through that on the subway. Once I even saw a dude scrolling on his phone and not even looking at it. This is just borderline addiction.
Twitter can be more interesting. I see this platform as a micro-blogging platform where you can share your ideas and thoughts. But there are way better alternatives. Why use Musk's Xitter (the X is pronounced as "sh")? Things like Mastodon and Bluesky do exist.
Oh boy here comes the holy grail. One of the largest social platforms to ever exist. There is so much to say about this platform.
I feel like most of us have some family member which is the "I get my information from Facebook groups, which certainly do not share disinformation" type of guy. When I sometimes see the Facebook page there is just a lot of useless stuff. Well, everything feels like useless information. I know that it might be because I am not following good sources. But in reality are there any such sources? I don't think so.
As I already mentioned I ditched Facebook some time ago. It was in some sense quite easy. Some sacrifices were made though. I do not have as many contacts as before, but actually, it does not matter. I would probably not even talk with them, to be honest. You know that we as a people have only a few "real friends" and not 500 of them (that's not even a ridiculous number).
Throughout this "offline time," I had I listened to some interesting thoughts. Lets see some of them.
Where do you get the news?
I am sorry what? You know that news pages exist and you could use RSS aggregator which is quite useful by the way.
How do you talk with others?
There are other messaging platforms you can use. Signal, matrix, and yes even telegram just to mention a few. We could talk about these platforms as well, since they are not perfect, but maybe some next time.
About 2 years ago I got back to Facebook, sadly. Since I have gone to college and some of my peers I have met, were asking for a contact. So typically on Facebook or using Instagram. I was like, yeah that is not possible. I am not present on either of them. I felt some kind of pressure which forced me to join Facebook again. Firstly it felt like a good thing to do. Now I don't like my decision anymore. I am convinced that it has a bad influence on me. It is just writing messages not really having a meaningful converstations.
I mean I can talk with friends more easily, but actually, the frequency of messages did not change at all. It is some kind of golden standard for communication, but I DO NOT LIKE IT. So I think I will be leaving Facebook soon.
Common issues
I try to cover some of the observations I have made throughout my offline-online time on some of the social platforms. And yet I have not covered more topics, which are quite common.
One of them is how they are using algorithms that try to push some posts more than others. Or the almighty fear of missing out (FOMO for short). There is so much information we can take that it is better to get used to missing some information. Not having such social platforms can help get rid of the temptation.
Screen times, everyone has their phones with them all the time and a lot of the time is spent scrolling through these endless pits of useless information which are easy to absorb. And the brain is therefore satisfied.