Late last year I had the opportunity to experience firsthand what this really means. Political unrest in my country uncovered some brutal truths about the world in general and my own country in particular, that lead to literally everything online becoming just depressing. Day after day for months, consuming that amount of negative news had me exhausted by early this year.
I had to cut back on social media by a lot, and get back into some of my older hobbies that had been on a backburner during this time. It took deliberate efforts to cut back the social media because it was just so easy to get sucked right back in. In any case it has been a real learning experience
I came away from Facebook 6 years ago when i realised it was majorly effecting my mental health with its seriously toxic and witch hunting environment. Then came away from Twitter in Jan partly because I had made cupoftea.social and wasnt spending time there anymore but also found that place had turned toxic. Ive found in the 7 months of running my own mastodon instance that less is more. Less content but more meaningful interaction with other people and I go out the house more often.
Honestly after leaving Reddit I can say that I already feel like my baseline mood has improved massively, just from not spending so much time every day scrolling through yet another school shooting and yet another life-hostile proposition by some Republican politician.
Generally it helps that Lemmy isn’t super US-centric (yet?).
I always kept off of ALL generally for this reason and made liberal use of the block feature for subreddits that were toxic. When kept just to my own subscriptions I had only myself to blame for my reddit experience. However I am liking the tone and feel of Lemmy. I’m pretty happy to migrate here.
Ever since the blackout, I’ve had more time, more energy, and I could focus better on the tasks at hand. Kbin/Lemmy being smaller makes the feed less depressing and more thoughtful, so it doesn’t affect me the same way.
Reddit did us all a solid 😂
Yeah thanks and fuck you spez.
I think the entirety of reddit has established patterns that are hard/impossible to break. Which caused me to develop a certain feeling of disgust when viewing at any sort of behavioral reddit meta.
It was getting difficult to post, difficult to comment, and difficult to find content that stimullates the mind intellectually. And it yet remains to be seen if federated link&news aggregators will share that same fate, or divert and do it differently.
@fossilesque And roleplaying is good for your mental health :D
I never really used social media because I had such massive social anxiety. But I did used Reddit (a short time) and YouTube
Reddit was easier because it had such montonic boring far-left content smeared everywhere. I just uninstalled the app and poof it was gone. I had urges to reuse it, but it was short lived
YouTube was much harder because of its very good recommendation algorithm. Even if I uninstalled it, I couldn’t stop myself from reinstalling it after a while. If I managed to keep the mobile app at bay, there was the desktop web version waiting for me. After a lot of infighting with my addicted brain, I now have NewPipe with all the Trending, Subscribed, New Videos crap disabled. And on the desktop side, I redirect youtube.com to piped.video, another non-addicting YouTube frontend
I couldn’t have been happier in my life before because of this small change
