There was always an uncomfortable element to it, but in the last few weeks it has been getting a lot worse. I notice myself feeling physically kind of unwell when I consider checking Mastodon (and other similar social networks, e.g. Bluesky).
A lot of it is down to the tone of posts.
Everything is very USA-dominated and dystopian-focused and spreading lots of alarm. I added hundreds of words to my filters, and when I go to the Explore page it's about 60% hidden posts now, and a lot of doom still manages to slip through the cracks.
My home timeline is a lot better, but again, things still manage to slip through my filtered words. I have to work so hard to find uplifting posts to read/enjoy/boost. When I find uplifting news elsewhere and decide to share it on Mastodon, about 60% of the time I get some kind of snarky/doomy response from someone making it about something else or being negative or sucking the positivity out of it.
The newly increased size of the filtered posts is an aggravating factor. I get that some people like to know who's posted something (or boosted something and from whom) so they can decide to unhide a filtered post, but I don't need that and now the filtered posts take up so much space, it's exhausting. I want them to be more subtle - and I don't want to hide them completely because sometimes I want to unhide things if I'm in the mood, or check that my filtered terms aren't hiding posts that I actually want to see.
I'm not really sure what to do. I know a big part of it is that humans naturally want to share bad news because it feels urgent and alarming and sharing bad stuff might help recruit more people to change it for the better. But the result is something that takes so much work. Like, when I open Mastodon, I have to also open the "filters" setting page in a second tab so that I can more easily add words and terms to the filters as and when I bump into them, just through ordinary use of Mastodon - browsing the Home and Explore tabs. Sometimes I'm adding a dozen a day or more.
The only exception is Tumblr. Somehow Tumblr is in a beautiful magic niche where my dashboard contains people just being great to each other and making each other's posts better with each reblog. When people get snarky or overly negative for ego, someone else absolutely decimates them. There is a tendency towards optimism.
I don't want to be here if everything about this place is trying desperately to drag me down and make me as miserable as possible, you know? The News page I use to see what people are talking about is like this:
- Tech company hurts marginalised people
- Public transport goodness (yay)
- Silly meme (yay?)
- Mass illness
- Cause for existential fear due to war
- War
- Christmas movie that I'm not interested in
- Tech
- Tech
- Look at this transphobia you can't do anything about!
- Racist violence
- Car tech (positive)
- Car tech (corporations being dicks)
- Mass surveillance
etc etc.
That's 7 negative doom, 2 positive, some dumb stuff and tech stuff...
I don't know, it's overwhelming. I have gotten some really valuable experiences and wholesome stuff from the internet over the years, and now it's like, googling stuff is useless, every website has four pop-ups to close before I can read anything, everyone is yelling about how existentially awful everything is and how it's going to get worse unless I personally DO SOMETHING (and I have to or so many people will suffer)...
It's very difficult because I'm neurodivergent and also mobility-disabled and have a lot of hours per day in pain, with tachycardia, and attempting to manage it and get on top of it so that I can move around and do nice things. So there's a bunch of time where I'm just, floppin' around, not really able to focus on something like reading a book or watching a movie. Social media used to be a pleasant enough way to mindlessly pass the time but now it's just a bottomless window into the horror shows of the worst of humanity that I'm completely powerless to affect. It's kind of traumatising.
I don't know what to do. The obvious answer is to stop using Mastodon (and similar services), and just stick to Tumblr unless I am doing Gender Census promo. But I think I will have to put some work in to break the habit, which is also a whole thing to have to gear up to do.
