So if anyone’s paying attention, I’ve been giving Twitter the heave-ho (I never acknowledged X) and I’ve moved the Groceteria account over to Bluesky. There’s not really an Otherstream presence there because let’s face it, there’s not really much of an Otherstream anymore.

I’ve always had a weird relationship with social media. After largely avoiding it in the 2000s, I jumped in more heavily during the 2010s with Facebook and later Twitter. I never warmed to Instagram at all, and TikTok was never a thing I contemplated even for a second. I use YouTube and flickr, but for their original purposes and not for any “social” aspects–and mostly as a consumer rather than a creator.

Then came COVID (which has been the start of so many paragraphs for so many people).

At some point during the pandemic, Facebook in particular stopped being a thing I enjoyed. It just wasn’t fun anymore and it almost seemed more like work. A lot of it was politics and pandemic stress. Surprisingly, my biggest issue was not people I disagreed but “friends” (using the social media definition of that term) with whom I was pretty much in sync. Eventually the memes, the clickbait, and the 24-7 outrage became too exhausting to slog through on a daily basis, even if most of it was aligned with my own end of the political spectrum. I had a lot of friends who posted nothing but this stuff, maybe because they (understandably) weren’t leaving the house much. But I was not willing to devote that much of my life to perpetual anger and to following other people’s online arguments with strangers.

Basically it got to the point where these posts were not increasing my knowledge. They were only increasing my anxiety level. Yes, I know everything sucks. No, I don’t need hourly reminders and repetitions of why and how it all sucks, and I refuse to spend 24 hours a day thinking about it. My mental health is more important to me than demonstrating an appropriate level of outrage by liking a meme or a reposted article.

So I swore off Facebook almost five years ago and haven’t really looked back. I feel bad because I’ve lost touch with a lot of people, but I still don’t think I can wander back into that community. And when I’ve peeked over the years (I still have to keep an account open for work) I see that a lot of my friends are also MIA at this point.

Twitter was a little different. It was never really a social thing for me, but more of a reading list and a way to promote the sites (more about Groceteria than Otherstream). It was not a place where I generally interacted or got into arguments. I actually felt I had a lot more control over the types of content on Twitter. It was good. Until it wasn’t anymore. It’s no secret how things went downhill REALLY FUCKING FAST when the Muskrat took over. Users abandoned the platform in droves and engagement went down to almost nothing. And a lot of the content I wanted to see was no longer there either. And it got infinitely worse over the past few months as said Muskrat revealed himself to be the full-on Nazi-channeling nutjob we all knew he could be.

So I’m out, partly as a statement (that no one but me really cares about) but also because Twitter just wasn’t fun anymore. Will the skies be bluer somewhere else? Who knows.

As I get older, I’m recognizing that maybe I’m way too much of an introvert. Maybe I’ll try interacting in person again. It used to work sometimes.