Moving away from "social media"

Over the last couple of months I’ve been becoming increasingly aware of the constant presence that “social-media” has in my life. I put “social-media” in quotations because with how things are going I’m finding it very difficult to understand how it can be considered a fitting name.

About six months ago, my morning routine would consist of at least 20–30 minutes of scrolling through Instagram Reels, or some other similar content-spewing software. I really did sometimes find myself in the cycle of “I’ve seen enough now”, closing the app, and then immediately reopening it at the hopes of scraping up a bit more dopamine. Now that I’m writing it out, it feels very silly – but that’s because it is silly. Of course the worst thing about it is that it’s by design, but I won’t spend a lot of time describing what the attention economy actually is (even though I don’t think it gets spoken about enough).

I don’t think it was too long after this time that I decided it would finally be sensible to delete Instagram entirely from my device. I realised there was nothing on that platform worth tuning in to see or read every day. There’s something to be said about missing out on contact with friends, but I think it goes back to the “social” in “social media” not really being fair usage of the term. There’s nothing “social” about logging-in to read about celebrity drama and political nonsense. Where’s the social media we had 15 years ago? The one where you only interact with friends and family. The one where the entire framework for having connections with individual people didn’t exist purely to encourage you to share content with one-another.

I was glad to be rid of it. I did sometimes find myself instinctively opening up the app drawer to look for it, only to remember how much better off I am not having access to it. I refrained from deleting my account, given that I do unfortunately still need to use my Meta account to stay in touch with family on WhatsApp, but that’s it.

I did find myself moving to Reddit, given that it was considerably easier to curate the content on my feed, and that it was a lot more discussionbased. Reddit brought about a new problem though, eventually. Aside from the amount of arguing I did with people, there were so many AI-generated posts. Like, the majority of posts were AI-generated on some days.

The majority of them were clearly just karma-farming accounts or developers looking to promote some new Saas project they “built”. Sometimes it was a little funny to see the errors they’d leave in the post, like missing where Claude left a tag which said “[Replace this with the license your project will use]”. I don’t consider myself a Luddite of any sort – I do actually use AI semi-regularly in software development, given how useful it can be as a tool – though I think people put too much trust into the tool’s ability to spit out an entire stack. I think every line written by an LLM should be properly audited, as it can (and does) make mistakes pretty regularly. Less about how I feel about AI, though…

The point is that I found myself gradually leaving subreddits that I lost interest in. This went on for a while until realising that I was in about five – maybe six – subreddits. This meant that my feed was a lot smaller given that there would only be so many posts in a set period of time from that many subreddits, and eventually I realised it was pointless. I went to my account settings and deleted the account completely. I didn’t really hesitate, nor feel that empty feeling I would’ve felt before upon losing years of personal information. It just… felt right at this point?

I’m finally at a point now where I haven’t really got any “social media” accounts anymore. I do still have WhatsApp and Discord installed to communicate with people who don’t really use any other platforms, but that’s it. There aren’t any platforms which are designed to constantly deliver attention-grabbing videos to me. I even switched off my YouTube watch history, as I remembered that it completely disables YouTube’s recommendation functionality, as well as YouTube shorts. I guess that works in my benefit?

The question I find myself asking now is what to do next? I suppose it’s a little depressing that I don’t know what to do with myself without these platforms to turn to. I will be back in university after the summer once my placement year is over, but in the meantime I still need to find ways to entertain myself outside of work.

I have been getting into self-hosting now as a substitute for doom-scrolling, which is very enjoyable! I pulled out the ThinkCentre M700 I’ve had lying around for a while and turned it into a homelab. I might write a little more about what I’ve been getting up to with it, but I managed to get Navidrome running pretty comfortably on there inside a Docker container, which meant I could say goodbye to YouTube music (and also gave me an excuse to use all of my CD’s for once).

I intend to create a small blog series at some point about this journey away from these pretty terrible platforms, though for now I intend to keep focusing on my placement and getting back to university. If you have any questions, suggestions, or thoughts, I would [contact](love to hear them).

Note: I do know em tags, en tags, and hyphens are. This was written with fingers, not tokens!