It’s been over four years since I deleted all my social media accounts. I began by deleting my Twitter account in 2018, and by the end of 2019 had deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts as well. For the most part I don’t have any regrets and am still glad I chose to do it.
Before I deleted everything, I realized that my experience of the world was being affected by these technologies in ways I didn’t like. Whether some scene made for a good Instagram post shaped not just what I looked at, but what I didn’t look at and what I went looking for. I was thinking in 280 characters, attempting to turn complex and nuanced thoughts into incisive and pithy tweets. My sense of community was dictated by how much engagement I got, how many people liked or shared my posts, how large my network of friends was.
Inevitably I attempted to try to get as much engagement as possible, so instead of sharing what I was truly thinking or feeling or seeing, I twisted those things into versions that I thought would get the most attention, altering not just my interpretations of what I had experienced but the experiences themselves. It was the ultimate filter.
There were many other reasons I wanted to delete my accounts, but it was realizing the ways social media altered my experience of the world that was the final push I needed.
When all the Twitter drama first started at the end of last year and Mastodon (and the fediverse generally) started getting attention as the alternative for journalists and other public intellectuals, I got curious. I joined a server in December 2022 and mostly lurked for a month or two. It had been a long time since I’d used anything like this and felt out of practice. I wasn’t even sure this was even something I wanted to do again. Just as when you come off a long fast it’s important to slowly reintroduce solid foods, I was trying to ease myself back in without doing too much damage.
But what compelled me to join a Mastodon server in the first place? The biggest reason was to find people like me: people who, through some combination of circumstances outside of their control and decisions very much within their control, found themselves without anyone who could understand the way they lived in the world, why they were motivated to make certain choices and not others, and who took seriously their responsibilities to the world. More specifically, I was hoping to find other adults who were caregivers for their disabled adult siblings. I wanted to find other people who understood the complexities of that situation and could relate to my experiences. I wanted community.
I still haven’t found that, at least not yet. But a recent exchange has made me realize are other benefits about the fediverse generally that I hadn’t considered, benefits that make me want to stick around even if I never find others with similar life experiences.
It’s fairly common to see posts reminding and encouraging others to engage, to reply and boost (retweet). I thought this odd at first, since that seems to be the natural way to use social media. But then I remembered that part of what makes Mastodon attractive is the lack of algorithms doing all the work for users. New users, and especially users who were accustomed to Twitter and Facebook, aren’t used to doing the labor usually done surreptitiously by algorithms tracking their every move and making decisions about what to show or suggest.
It takes a lot more work for spaces like Mastodon to be fruitful. Instead of outsourcing that labor to a data-hungry algorithm the users themselves are responsible for cultivating what they (and others) see and the interactions they have. This is a very different way of experiencing social media for me, and I imagine many others who grew up ignorant of the ways that Facebook and Twitter shaped what we saw without even realizing it.
Another added benefit of using a network of decentralized servers: you become slightly more decentralized as well.
Twitter and Facebook puts the individual user at the center, filtering out everything that was different from them, everything that they didn’t like or didn’t want to see. This was all done automatically, oftentimes without consent or knowledge, and took very little effort. If joining the fediverse and using Mastodon is disorienting—and it often is—it is precisely because it requires you to reorient yourself from being the center of the algorithms attention to being one node in a larger network of other human nodes.
I’m not trying to make it sound like Mastodon will save everyone from the narcissism of social media. I am still extremely skeptical and cautious about everything on the internet. Mastodon certainly has lots of drawbacks and limitations, and I am under no illusions to the contrary. But using it has, I think, positively changed how I experience social media—at least for now.