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I did a 17 day social media “detox”! It was meant to be a month, but for someone who hasn’t been purposely off the socials since... November 2007???? Yeah, for someone who has been continuously online that long, I feel pretty good about how long I lasted and feel like I learnt a lot from the experience.
So right up top: despite their flaws, I love these platforms, or at least the essence of them! There's so much we need to do to remake them. We can make being online not just less shit, but genuinely good, fun and enriching for people who want or need to be on here.
For more background; December of 2025 I tried to do a month off social media. I wracked my brain for a cute name for period of time for this post and my own sanity, as I hate the term “detox”. Disconnect December? DM me December? Don’t fucking log on december? But just going with detox for now.
Choosing December was a poor move as I will always want to see what all the queer people in my phone are doing for their end of year ins and outs, goals, punchcards I guess, resolutions and bingo cards! I wanted to see Vlogmas! Add to that the monotonous boredom of the season and I am surprised I lasted as long as I did. Sadly, it wasn’t The Vitamin, but I’m not sorry I did it.
I had never bothered trying a digital detox before for a bunch of reasons; social media adds value to my life, I enjoy conversing with all the gay people in my phone, and I feel no particular aesthetic or strictly life-improving draw to disconnecting. Ethically is a whole different kettle of fish, so I basically went into this for that reason. Maybe it would turn out I was missing nothing! Maybe these platforms add very little to my life, as well as causing horrors the world over?
Nah. Sorry. I love social media. But I can’t sweep aside the criticism of everything online as a skill issue, no matter how funny it would be to me. I assume you know all the reasons social media sucks and is bad for you, and have heard them all a billion times. I mostly focus on ethical stuff here rather than psychological or other harms.
I cannot deny that there are numerous ways social media is bad for the world - so let me list a handful of ways it’s good:
But Olu, none of that is worth the horror! I think the horror of it isn’t inevitable; few things in human life are. I don’t think we should continue posting on Zuckerberg’s internet like nothing is wrong if we can help it, but I also admit that the replacements for the incumbent juggernauts are not at full “ditch your friends and join z!” level yet.
However, one easy plea I would make, as a person with 17 days of uncomfortable disconnection under their belt, is that if it’s not adding to your life, you don’t need it for work, socialising or dating or something else I can’t think of at this second, you are so free to log off. Go and be free! Hit the bricks! The amount of people I talked to who said they always hated Twitter after it mysteriously and permanently disappeared from its servers was fucking mind-boggling to me. If you were waiting for a sign, you’re free now. Log off!
So, for everyone else who is still interacting with all the delights the online has to offer, and is still reading this instead of going outside or to bed or a paper book; what do we do about this mess? Depending on your specific qualms with life online, and level of coding or technical expertise, there are actually a lot of things you could do.
If you work for one of these big social media incumbents I’m surprised you’re watching this, but please join a union. If you don’t and aren’t technical, but you too hate Zuck, maybe ask your friends to move your WhatsApp chats to signal. If you’re technical and fancy a challenge there's loads happening with ATProto (the technology behind bluesky) and ActivityPub (the technology behind mastodon) every day, or you could grab up to a hundred of your closest pals and start a small social media instance with the help of things like runyourown.social or you could make something bespoke like davidsocial.com. There are also many guides to degoogling, and getting off these platforms as much as we personally can; on youtube Reject Convenience is great on this topic.
To be completely honest, I think boycotts of certain platforms and working on getting off them can go pretty far in terms of self-education, and the movement building of the medium to long term future.I guess building the muscles of resistance? Sam has a great video on anarchist calisthenics if you don’t get what I mean here.
I do think we won’t get anywhere organising only on incumbent platforms, and not grasping the work needed to build and most importantly maintain alternatives. In the interests of nuance, while these skills and platforms would be great for the people on them, I’m not fully sure that individual boycotts challenge power in the way some people think. A coordinated boycott of something like Instagram would be incredible, even for like a month, though again, I have no idea what would be a unifying demand, lol.
Thinking of a demand raises another question for me though. When it comes to social media, what do we actually want? I think it’s easy to get into this discussion assuming that we all mean the same things by social media, but I don’t think we always do.
Through discussions with friends online and AFK I’ve found that there are many ways of categorising online platforms and discussions and I was needlessly harsh in my digital detox. Like, is Goodreads social media? Was I just fiendishly scrolling on it out of absence of other infinite scrolling platforms to quell my addiction? I think honestly I was just bored and looking for interesting books; I read 3, listened to a few new-to-me albums and a lot of other music during the detox. I struggled a lot with the quiet spots in between activities where I would usually spend five minutes on Instagram or whatever. I could learn to knit or some other similar hobby just to fill those spots but I don’t actually think every moment has to be productive in some way, I just want to turn off my brain a little some of the time.
But yeah, my friend chee made me think about categories. The categories go something like this in my head… Online communication can either be something like chat platforms OR posting platforms. On a chat platform, all the messages appear in the same order for everyone all the time; no algo baby! Maybe you get left behind but the messages were there for you to see if you were online or a member at the right time. Posting platforms on the other hand are all public all the time, nail a leaflet to the door of the town square affairs. I think there are interesting inbetweens; david social i guess is a chat platform as i could go through and look at every post ever if i wanted to, but i guess it's also a posting based platform as it’s structured like one so i never feel the urge to do so, and it has a “following” mechanism which i guess is algorithm-lite????
Whether David social dot com counts as posting is barely the point. The point is that i cut myself off from all acquaintance and large group chatting as i assumed posting and chatting were the same. And basically that all digitally mediated communications are the same. I need a constant drip of chatter and random observations from people I feel fondly towards to thrive apparently. I think most people who are anti-social media are anti-posting, not anti-chatting.
I do sometimes wonder whether I’m addicted in some actually harmful way, and somehow missing the harm it causes me? I’m sure my feelings around social media give “I could quit any time I want, honest”, but also I don’t think it qualifies as an addiction if it’s not worsening or ruining my life.
Infinite scrolling, possibly invented by a man who is very sorry about it, is often likened to the slot machine. because it throws out rewards intermittently, because it reduces friction in continuing, and because it incentivises you to stick around and see what might be behind the next roll of the dice, endlessly.
If I’m more honest, after the detox I dunno if i could stop using social media any time I want to, as I have never wanted to. The internet hasn’t been actively, noticeably, chronically bad for my life since the early-to-me days of instant direct messages — and I’m not going to lie, the heady days of MSN Messenger could easily have ruined my life, and not just academically — but that isn’t really social media in the way people mean, at least in the conversations I've had and in the articles and books I've read. Most people seem to see private messaging as a completely separate beast to the broadcasting nature of public social media, even in large group chats like discord.
Algorithmically driven, posting-based social media is different. It’s increasingly designed in a compulsion building way. It would be remiss of me not to mention the things I’ve done to fight this. Thinking about my Instagram feed in particular, I realise how rigorously I've moderated my social media. I know I've followed a disproportionate amount of fat and/or black and/or queer and/or disabled people for a while to see if it helped my brain not feel as inadequate and/or happier on the app, and spoiler it really did. I also try hard to only follow people who I actively look forward to seeing their stuff if they come up in my feed often, rather than following out of a weird mix of obligation, inertia. I was also following so many accounts I never saw much of any individual person.
I’m in no way advocating that everyone should just do that and their experience on instagram would be great. Firstly, Instagram in no way makes it easy to curate in this way, and I’m a notable zuck hater (if he has no haters I'm dead etc). If I reflect more I think I do take a lot of tedious steps to ensure my experience is good on most platforms, and I can't ignore that in talking about it.
Threads, however, is algorithmically a cesspool, and you won’t convince me to take it seriously. Facebook is also a swamp but I get to see the terrifying and/or wholesome things people I knew in high school and uni are up to, otherwise I would definitely not use it at all either. Threads and Facebook in particular I feel like are trying to get a rise out of their users, and are flexing their knowledge of their users to do that. I think a very algorithm heavy following feed can obviously “work” for some definition of that — look at tiktok! — but I don't want to see controversial opinions as regularly as they are served up on there.
“Social media is actually for psychic combat” seems to be the direction? I hate it. Separate from the general “the content there makes me annoyed and sucks” feeling, I only noticed recently that Threads is using a “for you”, TikTok-style, algorithmically-generated feed explicitly now, and lands there when you open the app instead of who you follow. Threads historians - a laughable phrase - are going to have to chime in with whether they explicitly called it “for you” from the inception of the app but i don’t think so, as I remember so much annoyance and surprise that it was all brands and other stuff we didn’t purposely follow in the early days.
Either way, another creator I really like, pagemelt, once said in Instagram stories how a TikTok style feed is one thing when you have a face and/or voice attached to an idea; when ideas are completely disconnected from their creators through mostly text only posts and no culture of following creators, it paves the way for AI generated content in feed to become more popular and normalised. As well as a threads hater I’m a certified AI hater and this seems sadly really plausible to me, especially given other stuff Zuckerberg has said about replacing human friends with AI, so I will continue not giving Threads the time of day.
Threads hate aside, I don’t think finding some social media sites to be irredeemable crap is incompatible with enjoying the idea of it in general. Just that some examples are better or worse at serving my, or anyone’s, needs.
When I started writing this post, I really hated the idea that maybe we all need to cede the big open plains of the internet, and that maybe social media just has to be small to be good.
There are two theories that are super indicative and super annoying to me, both around ways of conceptualising the actual human content density of the internet. One of them is “Dead Internet theory”, the idea that the internet has been overrun by bots and AI content to the point you rarely see a human. This seems immediately laughable to me; maybe if you’re counting the undulating plains of the internet as a whole, for example I'm not accounting for the dark web. I don't believe most people are mostly interacting with bots, no matter my low opinion of generative AI.
There’s also “dark forest theory”; lifted from the dark forest hypothesis, the latter being the idea that the reason we don’t hear from aliens is that everyone smart stays silent on the intergalactic level; chat shit, get banged, space style. Posting on the open web, where you can be misinterpreted at best and swatted, harassed, etcetera at worst is for the birds! You should stick to your safe and cosy enclaves, with small(er) numbers of people, for safety and comfort. Though I do still feel the encroaching tides of AI-generated content getting higher by the minute, my main reason for not liking dark forest theory was that it was sad! Everything fragmented and disconnected again! Going back to scouring compiled lists and getting word of mouth recommendations for finding other compatibly weird groups of people sounds like hell to me.
On the other hand, I do like the idea things could be more localised on purpose. Many people are putting their hopes in newsletters and private messaging services, so I guess that small(er) social media sites were at least better than that! I kinda thought small sites always felt like a shoddy imitation of the real thing, at least until davidsocial.com! David social dot com has already changed my feelings about very small social media — like apparently it can be a fun and delightful experience if someone puts a bit of care into it —though I admit I don't know how I’d ever have heard about it if it wasn’t for larger social media platforms.
David social dot com:
A part of me thinks it can’t be healthy, even if I’ve taken the aforementioned steps to mitigate harm. Another part says we’re all in silos on social media anyway, filter bubbles built up by our preferences, and that I don’t think that following things that make me angry, upset or scared on purpose does much to rebalance the scales. The latter is kinda supported by a book I read.
Breaking the social media prism is a book about polarisation on social media, otherwise known as extreme differences in opinion that lead to conflict, both on and offline. In one of many experiments they describe and that I may summarise poorly, they tried showing lefties random right wing content, and vice versa, via a bot they opted into to diversify their feed. Spoilers, but everyone just doubled down on their opinions regardless of political background.
I don’t know for sure, but deeply feel that social media isn’t the place to widen your horizons politically. I feel like you need deep and close relationships with people trying to change your mind in most cases, and whilst social media can foster that, following randoms you disagree with isn’t the way to nurture it. I’m supposed to worry about echo chambers I guess, the phenomenon where everyone around you is saying the exact same thing and you’re never exposed to other opinions? I’m pretty happy to be in an echo chamber at every time save for election season to be honest, I’m unsure what i am supposed to gain by being harrowingly aware of everyone else’s thoughts about how many people think immigrants/global majority people/queer people/trans people/etc have ruined their country, life or whatever.
Another way to conceive of the different kinds of social media comes from my friend honor:
twitter is like an infinite plane, where you can make direct eye contact with anyone from anywhere with any understanding of the world at any moment. federated socials are like a hilly valley - you set up camp on your home server (which you presumably picked because it looked like a nice spot and the people there seemed to have something in common with you), and only hear tell of other communities through people you know, at least loosely. if you want to go a long way from your chosen base, you have to go through real people. you have to go through mutual friends. — personal correspondence, 2022
Call me a spherical cow cos I love an infinite plane! I think this is part of what makes me love the internet so much; I kinda want to lock eyes with a stranger anywhere else, all of the time, at least metaphorically! I think to most people, at least from talking about it, the latter example from the quote sounds a lot more relaxing. I think the aforementioned solutions people are working on can definitely fulfill the valley-based need safely and ethically, or to be honest just head and shoulders above where we are right now. But what about us spherical cows?
I think the idea of the global town square was always a bit of farce, especially when applied to Twitter before it’s mysterious and tragic disappearance, and the circles of “friends” curated on Facebook never really stood up to muster either. I don’t have a solution for the flat plane; maybe the ATProto crowd can make it work.
I used to be very up for loads more governance, like the famously never wrong or harmful UN model would be a solution. I thought we needed a consortium or leading group of standards people like we have for web technologies, the web version is called W3C. I now doubt that would help without huge legal ramifications for messing up, and I don’t know how you make something like that as toothful as it needs to be. Still, W3C for social media would be an amazing start, at least to have a blueprint for governance, security and moderation for the incumbent social media giants.
There are many good groups doing amazing work on the legal side of holding the current state of things to account: the electronic frontier foundation, or EFF, foxglove in the UK, and unions, gonna plug them again!
Many of the problems with social media at the minute — and to be honest big tech in general — come down to big tech’s tendency to brag about how central it is to our lives in one breath, but also not so central that it should be taxed or overseen or regulated at all, all in the name of innovation in a different breath. In the name of moving fast and breaking things, the often repeated slogan of many a tech startup, we have moved so quickly that we’ve broken things that needed a lot more care taken to reform, dismantle or “innovate” around.
Does corporate social media have to exist? Can non-corporate/indie/”small” social media escape the issues that plague the big dogs? Does non-commercial/indie/”small” social media have what people crave? Why do small social media platforms feel different (derogatory) to me? Is this a skill issue on my part?
Are we destined to retreat from the open fields of the early internet into smaller cosier spaces for lack of better options? Is there a way to not be hobnobbing with Nazis for those of us who want to be on the open road?
There are definitely loads more solutions I haven't thought of, but that’s where I turn to you! Please don’t tell me to watch the social dilemma or the social network for that matter. Please don’t tell me to log off or to amorphously “hold social media giants to account” or whatever, but yeah.
There’s something in all this about social media as an escape from real life, versus social media as an augmentation of it. I think to me it’s always added, but for a lot of people what it adds isn’t something they crave, something they would ever desire or in some cases it even takes away. I will always want a pen pal. Not everyone does. I also have no way of knowing what it’s doing and done to my mind. I have no control sample of the Olu who went outside and touched grass at more regular intervals. Would I be happier? Funnier? More fulfilled? We’ll never know and I’m pretty okay with that.
Those of us that like typing away on our screens, I think there’s something here to save. We just have to get to work.
Do you feel like social media adds or detracts from your life? Do you think there’s stuff worth saving here? Thanks for reading!
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