Ask Lemmy

Are we all feeling like this right now? Right around June I was getting fed up with pretty much everything in social media, it's just too much to keep up with.

• Nearly everything in /r/all would burn me out through sheer outrage engagement
• The whole YouTube anti-adblocker thing hasn't touched me, but it's sitting there in the back of my mind, reminding me I may just have to endure countless amounts of ads to watch the content I follow, and it's starting to turn me away from consuming as much YouTube content as before. Once the adblocker collapse happens, I'm not sure I'll hang out in YouTube anywhere near as much. I've done a good enough job at keeping the content itself healthy by being knowledge hungry and mostly watching educational channels, but the drama sometimes does seep through the cracks (looking at you, ukelele girl who I don't care about).
• I am attempting to burn all connections to streaming subscriptions by hosting my own plex server for me and all my friends. I put the burden of maintaining it on myself, so I don't have an issue with that even if it does bring a bit of stress to my life, but what IS getting to me a lot, is how the approach of canceling or taking a massive dump on good shows is now taking off in mass scale. I am finishing up season 3 of Snowpiercer and now I don't really want to watch the last episode because FUCKING ZASLAV FUCKED WITH IT ALL. I had this mentality with anime, where I wouldn't jump into an anime if it wasn't done (fucking Attack on Titan, man), but now it's clear that this is the healthiest approach to any shows or movies, lest you get invested in a lost cause with no chance of closure.
• Delivery apps aren't safe here either, I ended up buying an app solely to block ad push notifications from these apps. I've blocked thousands of notifications from them in just a month or two.
• Instagram, which I try to keep as healthy as possible mental-health wise, is all down to ads of everything I speak about with my girlfriend. We can't discuss anything without seeing ads about it 5 minutes later. The whole "everybody's life is more interesting than mine" effect is definitely taking a toll on me, but never quite like the ads and the targeted content drowning my feeds.
• My WhatsApp chat groups have become veeeery polarized due to the toxicity of other platforms getting to all of the members in the chat group, leading to tiktoks and reddit posts being shared for right and left leaning ideologies with very antagonizing postures, and the subsequent hours-long arguments that lead to nowhere, on topics that affect none of us in the groups.
• I bought a groundnews subscription hoping it would help me look at broader, more neutral pictures, but the news cycles themselves burn me out, to the surprise of no one. I don't regret the subscription, but it's not healthy to open the app any more frequently than about twice a week.
• Now that I discovered the fediverse, I went from not knowing at all about any of this a few weeks ago, to having Meta fighting to potentially take control of the entire thing through EEE/EEC tactics. It already feels stressful having that on my mind at all.

So yeah, I'm pretty burnt out. I ended up muting notifications for all my social media, to the point where I'm OK with sacrificing instant replies to family and my girlfriend, but it doesn't feel like it's been enough, and I'm not sure what else to do other than to try to go outside more, touch some more grass, and do my absolute best not to pick up my phone. As you can infer by seeing this post here, I haven't been very successful at that either.

Lemmy is increasing it, since I'm spending more time on here to help participate. I check in like every couple hours and try to find a few things to post in different places every day.

I'm doing it on purpose though, since this is a helpful time to assist the community grow by contributing and helping curate content. It's a delicate time when there's more work to be done than users to do it. It won't be that way forever, though, and I know I can take a social media break whenever I want, so it's fine. Not my first rodeo, I know what I'm about. But yes it's a little tiring. Not even just starting over, but maintaining the participation in general.

I am rising from the ashes like a phoenix.

Maybe im in the minority as Ive never had an account on any social media. I have no interest in following anyone & I can't stand so called influencers, I buy products on merit not because some numpty tells me to buy it. I don't class Reddit as social media as I only used it for obtaining/giving information in niche forums.

I'm hoping Lemmy/Kbin will prove just as valuable a resource over time, hopefully I can chime in here & there to help someone occasionally

Oh, buddy, I am well past a social media burnout... 😂

Tbh I've found that the only thing that has been keeping me online is that I really don't know what to do when I'm by myself and waiting for something to happen or time to pass infact when I visited Florida to check out the college I'm about to go to I was very surprised by how little time I spent on reddit then when I got back home all I noticed how I only ever doom scrolled on reddit so I'd probably say I've already burned out it's ether that or all the entertaining posters left reddit long before the API change

One of the great things about Lemmy is that you can control your user experience. No algorithms, no "suggestions" being forced on you, no ads, no data mining, no spez/Musk/Zuck. So curate my Lemmy space heavily and enjoy the peace and quiet and slow pace. R*ddit was my only social media for years so Lemmy is similar enough to that to be familiar and useful, but different enough to be worth using.

It is addictive - but if you use it responsibly it can be okay, just make sure to use it rather than allow it to use you. Related: https://kbin.social/m/tech/t/113196/An-older-article-that-is-taking-on-new-significance-considering.

Not much:

I haven't used Facebook in years.

I deleted Twitter when the Elon shenanigans began.

I replaced Reddit with Lemmy, so that's fine.

I love Instagram because I follow accounts for hobbies, pretty things and yummy food. The only drama I follow is related to Soccer and Formula 1, LOL, so that's just funny.

Also, purposely avoided joining Snapchat and TikTok, because it was going to be too much. And I won't be joining Threads.

Im burnt out by the current state of social media. I remember when early Facebook where there was more focus on the people and sharing. These days it’s all bots, and ads. Im in a new area and I’m trying to use it to find people to do my hobbies with but it’s been hard.

I really use very few platforms. Was mainly Reddit, now mainly Kbin. No Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram, too old for Snapchat.

I stopped visiting Facebook several years ago. I think it was for two reasons:

1. I decided it was unhealthy for my in real life relationships to see how people behaved on Facebook.
2. When I noticed that Facebook was showing me way more “suggested” crap than stuff from my friends.

I never used Twitter. It just wasn’t for me.

Maybe too old and too much of a curmudgeon for Instagram and Snapchat.

Leaving Reddit was going to be hard. I tried Mastodon but, like Twitter, that wasn’t what I was looking for.

When I found kbin, I made the switch and that’s it. I have one sub I still check out on Reddit, but here if used to be daily, now it’s a few times a week. It’s continue to diminish I’m sure as the community on the deliverer grows.

I use lots of platforms for different reasons and don't really mind it much:

Instagram and Threads to interact with my friends, one for text content and the other for images. I can't really do that yet with Threads but the Zuck said he's gonna add a following-only feed soon.

Discord to chat with friends.

Lemmy for casual scrolling.

Twitter for when I'm incredibly bored and need to burn time.

WhatsApp to talk to family members.

I also have R*ddit installed but only to log in once a week or so and get the latest OPM chapter from r/onepunchman (and to repost it to the onepunchman Lemmy community).

I’ve had this feeling for a while now. It’s not restricted to social media, but media in general, having a lot of options that are all just a few degrees of shitiness from each other. It is tiring and makes me less likely to interact with media overall. On the bright side, interacting with media less and living in the moment more has improved my mental health.

I'm getting burnt out on jumping platforms every couple years. Loving Mastodon but the user base isn't there yet, unfortunately.

Reddit worked great because it allowed me to engage with people and share content without the expectation of creating an online identity and stuff like you do with Twitter, Facebook, etc. It's all "me, my stuff, my likes, my retweets." Doesn't matter how much karma I get on Reddit; I'm still a nobody in a sea of nobodies.

A lot of good insight on here.

I myself, am getting up there. I am only now just entering Hive Social as a twitter replacement. I'm BEGGING for a Facebook replacement at this point that's not just another Zuck project. I've replaced Reddit with Lemmy so far.

As for anywhere else, I know of them but I can't bring myself to the levels of contribution and commitment as I have with the other social platforms like FB, Reddit, Lemmy, Twitter, Hive .etc

Because it's just too much work, you know? Your mind is continually running like a piston engine for thought as to what to say and everything as part of a community. Social Media risks everyone of running off the treads eventually until they just decentralize themselves from it all and hide in places like Discord where that's all that they can handle, some people, no where.

I've been doing this social media thing since the 2000s, so that's 20+ years of hopping forum to forum, from platform to platform now. We're all forced to just run away, stand the tide of bullshit or just withdraw ourselves.

But yeah, I can't do things like Gaia Online anymore because I'm way too old for that place now. Twitter, is Musk's Playground, regardless of the new CEO in place. FB is just there because my friends on there are stubborn. Reddit, after years of being banned and having to make accounts because of the waves of toxicity, I'm finally tired of it. Instagram, WhatsApp, Snapchat, Tiktok .etc I refuse to join and apply myself in.