The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

Before its fall, I had over 700 followers on Twitter. I could post any random thought and within minutes be having an interesting conversation with some rando about it. For example I pondered why phone manufacturers didn't use a p2p protocol for distributing updates and had an enlightening conversation with a person who worked for a major telco chiming in as to why that would be problematic for their infrastructure.

This was my biggest source of joy on the modern internet.

When the walls fell and everybody left, I dropped 200 followers to 500 but by X's own metrics no one sees my tweets. I would estimate between 13 and 20 is my average view count. When I do post, I am lucky a single person interacts, and it is almost always someone I know in the real world.

I have presences on Mastodon and Bluesky, but my follower count on both remains in the low teens. I don't think the market is there anymore for "dude that ponders technology questions". I tweet like it's 2010 and no one cares anymore.

This was the death of social media for me. This was the last place I was really "social" on the internet and it died.

Genuinely this has had a very negative effect on me, the only somewhat of a silver lining is that I now have these conversations with ChatGPT. It's not as much fun though.

Instagram is just brainrot these days. I'd used it for years to post my absolute best photos as a sort of curated gallery. No one cares anymore. Nothing I post ever gets seen. Why bother.

That sums up my general opinion of all social media these days, why bother.

I started using Twitter in 2007 and eventually got up to around 1400 followers. Indeed, it was amazing for a while, and I had many experiences that were only possible due to my connecting with many people on there. Unfortunately it had been getting worse and worse, even before it was taken over and renamed and so on.

Fortunately, Mastodon has completely taken its place for me, and it actually affords me a good degree of agency over what I see. It's a linear feed of posts by the people I follow, with comprehensive filtering (and even better, people voluntarily put content warnings on their posts about potentially-difficult topics). It's actually pretty badass, even if it isn't perfect.

You can certainly keep having cool conversations with people on Mastodon, like the good old days of Twitter. That's all I do. I follow people who post about neat stuff, and they follow me cuz I post about stuff I (and apparently they) find interesting. Just people hanging out, basically. You don't need to worry about growing an audience or whatever (though I'm sure you already knew that heh :))