Ben Werdmüller (Ben Werdmüller)Last year, on a whim, I left social media on Thanksgiving, and didn't return until January 1st. It led to massive improvements in my mental and physical health, overall happiness, attention span, and engagement with the world. This year I've been with my mother while she spent months in the hospital...
I’ve been thinking about this since last night and am half-tempted just to give it up all together and go full indie, but I would be cutting out far too many people that I really like and get a lot out of. However, I’ve been slowly moving further and further away from the toxicity of corporate platforms in any case, so, like Ben, I’ll declare myself all-in on boycotting the attention economy in December.
In my case, this primarily means giving up Twitter since I’ve long since jettisoned Facebook (and really don’t miss it) and it’s been ages since I’ve scrolled through my heavily pared down Instagram account which I now only access through a feed reader to cut out ads. So as to not cut myself off completely, I’ll still interact with others online with my own IndieWeb website and through a small handful of excellent feed readers where I have complete control over what I see and when.
I’ll start to prep for the cleanse today by removing the Twitter app from my phone.
I went a few months where I did not really engage with Twitter, only responded to people who may have mentioned me. I felt that there were too many aspects that I missed, although I think that it is possible. I too may try no Twitter for December.
I’m predominantly reading Twitter in my feed reader, so I don’t see some of their odd notifications. However, I do check occasionally and apparently yesterday was an auspicious day.
Replied to In the year of our blog 2019 by Clint Lalonde (EdTech Factotum)
The sad part of this is how painfully limiting the conversation can be on social with the character limitations and too many issues with branching conversations and following all the context.
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 12:51PM
I’m curious what things would look like if you similarly did an analysis of Twitter, Facebook, etc.? Where are you putting more time? What’s giving you the most benefit? Where are you getting value and how are you giving it back?
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:01PM
–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
–Highlighted December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
certainly a laudable goal!
It helped me a lot to simply delete most of the social media apps off of my phone. I scribbled a bit about the beginning of the process back in November and there’s a link there to a post by Ben doing the same thing on his own website.
More people are leaving social feeds for RSS feeds lately. I’ve recently started following Jeremy Felt who is taking this same sort of journey himself. See: https://jeremyfelt.com/tag/people-still-blog/
Kudos as well to making the jump here:
https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
In part, it’s what prompted me to visit your site to write a comment. (Sorry for upping your cis-gendered white male count, but 2019 was a bad year, and hopefully we can all make 2020 better as you’ve indicated.)
–Annotated December 19, 2019 at 01:03PM
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