Auditing my social media use and news consumption

Replied to Auditing my social media use and information consumption (Elizabeth Tai)

When you get such extreme mental fatigue from social media and you just want to check out and sleep all day – you know you’ve got a problem.

I’m following Elizabeth’s example here, as I think her template is excellent and very easy to follow. My relationship to news and social media has drastically changed in the past couple of years, and I’m happy to say I’ve been having a much more positive approach to social media especially − I was extremely addicted and active and am still dealing with the effect it had on my brain.

As much as I’ve improved, I still have a habit of opening the social media I still use compulsively, which gives me the same context-switching issue as Elizabeth.

There are many social networks that I still have an account on, but that I have uninstalled and don’t log in to. I use Beeper, an app that bridges a bunch of instant messaging services into a single app. This way, I don’t have a feed at all, but I don’t force my friends to find me on an app they don’t want to use (namely, Signal).

Instant messaging services

Social media	Dedicated app?	Who do I talk to?
Instagram	❌	My ex-colleagues, a few travel friends. My sister sends me Reels.
Slack	❌	My favourite group chat. (I also use Slack for work and have a dedicated app for that on my work devices.)
Discord	❌	A few Patreon communities. I actively monitor meme chans and that’s about it; everything else is hidden in Beeper.
WhatsApp	✅	My partner and family. A few local social groups for organizing activities.
Telegram	❌	Wikimedia & work. I only bridge Wikimedia conversations to Beeper; work conversations are on the dedicated app, which I only have on my work devices.
Signal	✅	My neighbours, my high school friends, my work union, and more.
SMS	❌	A few friends. Companies.
Facebook Messenger	❌	One friend, organizing events with that one friend and other people.

Social media with feeds

Social media	Do I check the feed?	Do I post?	Notes
Instagram	❌	❌	I’m keeping my account mostly for DMs with friends, and also because of the horrible gating if you’re not logged in. As long as queer organisations don’t understand that Instagram is not their friend, I guess I’ll still need this account.
Facebook	❌	❌	I log in relatively often « without thinking », even though I have Messenger on Beeper. To fight that, I’ve installed a Firefox extension that completely hides my feed.
TikTok	❌	❌	I’m glad I managed to kill my presence on this app.
LinkedIn	✅	✅ (sharing company posts)	I’ve found myself opening LinkedIn all the time recently, by sheer force of habit. It’s always bad. I should remove the feed altogether. Also, I’m not looking for a job anymore, so I should probably let it go and only use the company account / share from my account.
Twitter	❌	❌	I deleted my personal account, which was incredibly hard, in 2022. I now have a small work account where I force myself to only follow work stuff and interact with work stuff − unfortunately, my new industry is almost entirely Twitter-based. Yikes.
Mastodon	✅	✅	I’ve unfollowed almost everyone, in order to keep a clean and relatively uneventful feed. I follow a few friends through RSS feeds because I still want to see their posts. I cross-post from my blog to there. I had gotten pretty good at ignoring Mastodon altogether, but the Olympics made me want to share happiness and opinion live with people. Of course, I forgot to take into account that Mastodon is a militant social network where people are supposed to hate the Olympics, so I checked the hashtags, contributed a bit, realized I was exposed to constant anger and stopped. Now, I just need to lose the « tab opening » habit again.
YouTube	❌	❌	Elizabeth counted this as a social network, and so will I. I have removed everything from YouTube interface except for opening a single video, and I follow all my liked channels through Inoreader (RSS), meaning when I open YouTube, it’s to open a specific video, watch it, and close the tab. I love to read comments − mostly because I watch videos on very well-moderated channels, where the comments are actually constructive and interesting.
Inoreader (RSS blogroll)	✅	N/A	My RSS feed reader, which includes my blogroll, is a social network as far as I’m concerned: that’s how I find out what my friends and favourite creators have been up to, even if the actual interaction is elsewhere. The bad side: I open the app compulsively, several times per online hour. The good side: when there’s nothing new, the page is blank and I can’t doomscroll.