My relationship with Facebook lasted around 7 years. In late 2008 I jumped on board and soon reconnected with old college classmates and former co-workers. I played Mafia Wars and wrote on  the virtues of Dungeons & Dragons Fourth Edition (side note: AEDU 4ever).

By fall 2015 the wheels were coming off. Turns out, if I wanted to talk to old college classmates and former co-workers, I would have kept their email address or phone numbers. Zygna games were giant scams. Online chatter about the new D&D 5E bounced between “vitriolic over folks not liking it” and “vitriolic over folks liking it”. And the specter of the 2016 election already loomed large over the social networks.

I used a script to block any posts with the word “election” or the names of any of the nine thousand declared candidates. Throwing in some other words I soon had a completely empty timeline. It felt good. Time to leave.

My three flings with Twitter X Twitter combined to 18 months. One pre-pandemic, one during the pandemic, one in the first weeks of Musk-ovite takeover. The same problems plagued each encounter. It took no effort to collect around 1K followers (writers are needy and will follow back anyone). But who were this people? I didn’t care about the personality tests of main characters, about pitching to agents via Tweets, about being in a community with these nutjobs.

The only thing different between my times at Twitter was the level of animosity, always on the rise.

Since then I’ve tried and left Mastodon. 2016 saw the birth of a quickly-shuttered MeWe account. There’s so many social media services. I’ve used many of them in the past, I use none of them now. It’s not complicated.

It’s not just that social media is terrible (ding) or that it actively empowers corporations with proven track records of doing the Wrong Things (ding) or that it is a massive time suck (ding ding ding). The final drop that breaks the dam, that last straw, is fully on me and not any platform. If I’m not physically interacting with someone, meaning if we’re not sharing a meal, having a drink, getting coffee–hell, even just talking on the phone or via Teams–it’s hard for me to care.