Saying Goodbye to The Socials
A little over a week ago, I deleted my one-person Mastodon instance.
It's something I'd been mulling over for a while. It wasn't really sparking the interest it once did. Whilst I think that Mastodon is different from the other social networks. It come with it's own problems.
My Social history
Facebook was the first proper social media I joined, back in 2007. Whilst I was at university, I lived in halls with poor phone signal, so me an my friends relied on MSN Messenger to chat. When Facebook came along we all hopped on there. I left Facebook in around 2018. My unease after the Cambridge Analytica stuff grew and I was getting less utility out of it, so got rid of it.
I think I picked up Twitter in maybe 2013? I'm not entirely sure. I left in 2020 during Covid times. It was non-stop doomscrolling and really not making me happy.
Despite how terrible the feed is, Linkedin is something of a necessity. I'm not exactly sure when I created an account, possibly 2011. When I job search I use recruitment consultants. They immediately check your Linkedin profile, so it adds a degree of plausibility to your CV. I don't post there. I've unfollowed all real people, at one point this gave me a totally clean feed. However, now it's pure AI and sponsored posts. I almost never log in as I quite enjoy my current job.
PixelFed
Whilst using Mastodon, I came across PixelFed. I used this briefly, but then because of Federation I wasn't exactly sure of the point of having different apps that all draw from the same network. So got closed my account.
Honourable Mentions
- Bookwyrm - ActivityPub book logging
- Google Plus - I started using just before it became a complete ghost town
- Reddit - Lurker, but not account holder. So no casual browsing any longer
- HackerNews - Is this social media? Not sure. Now blocked on my PiHole.
- Funkwhale - ActivityPub music publishing
- Instagram - Had an account when Facebook wanted to bolster their numbers. Quit when I quit Facebook
Mastodon
And so to Mastodon. I think I joined in around 2017/2018. Fosstodon was my instance of choice. I left Fosstodon in around 2023, when I started my own server. I already self-hosted some services, so adding Mastodon wasn't too onerous. Fosstodon's user numbers grew quite a bit whilst I was there with successive migrations of Twitter users. I think in the end it grew too big and I wanted to scratch the self-host itch, so migrated to my own instance.
Mastodon, I think, gave me a more positive experience in social media than others. I think that the biggest thing that I enjoyed was taking part in silly drawing challenges: Inktober, Swordtember, Aughost, and Crawltober to name a few.
So why did I delete my instance?
I think that it boiled down to me not really enjoying it and not really seeing the point. There are a number of reasons and triggers, but I don't think that I really want to document them all. It would just be a list of grievances, and probably a lot of post-hoc justification.
I enjoyed my time, but it wasn't for me anymore.