From what I've seen, it's a pretty common belief across Geminispace and Gopherspace that social media is not healthy or good for people. I agree, and I've decided to write a little bit about my experience with social media.
When I was 13 years old, I excitedly signed up for a Facebook account. I thought it was really neat to be able to play games and have a little corner of a big website to myself. The wall metaphor was fun, and I used it to keep in touch with friends from school (who I'd see every day anyway 🤷). Facebook couldn't keep my attention for long, especially when I got to high school.
The first smartphone I ever had was a Nokia Lumia 920, that is, a Windows Phone. While I loved how it worked and how it looked, it didn't have the most locally relevant social media at the time: Snapchat. The CEO of Snap, Inc. said that he hated Windows and would never put out an official app for Windows Phone or something, so I got by with the beta version of Instagram from 2015. Facebook by that time had become boomerville, so I stuck to Instagram and Reddit by way of Baconit (good reddit app). This worked, but definitely made me miss out on some high school shenanigans (not that I missed much to be honest.) By far the most interesting social media app I used was called Rando. It was an app that took a circular picture and sent it to another random user somewhere around the world. I don't know if it even counts as proper social media, now that I'm reflecting back on it, as you had no control of where the picture was sent.
After the Windows Phone platform sunk, I switched to an Android. I got a Snapchat, and mainly used Instagram. I played around with Snapchat for a while, but I never heavily used it like some of my friends did. Some people use it basically like a dating app, and while I've arranged a few dates through it, I don't think it works well like that. We all know what most people use it for, and I just wasn't interested.
Instagram on the other hand would consume about 2-3 hours of my day every day for years. It would show me the highlight reel of other peoples' lives, and leave me feeling like a layabout who hadn't accomplished anything. Suffice it to say that while I still have an account, I never use it anymore.
Throughout all of this I was on and off Twitter, which sucks for reasons other than Instagram &c.. Twitter is just a rage-engine, all it does is show you the worst things possible, so you invent a person with the opposite opinion as you in your head so that you can own him epic style. Not worth using regularly. I keep it around only for some of my friends; my account is set to private.
I think I have an account on a fediverse server too.
What a mess. Nowadays I write in Geminispace, shitpost on imageboards, and talk with a few friends over Discord. I really don't like 'traditional' social media because it exacerbates any self-loathing or low self-esteem I might have just to make money for itself. I like my friends IRL too, but never once have we talked about a post one of us has made online. I believe that stuff online simply doesn't matter as much as stuff IRL, or as the old meme says:
Internet is srs business
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