No Feed
Why I am done with social media — algorithmic or otherwise
I have been an early adopter for most of my life. New platforms, new tools, new ways of being online — I was usually there before most people had heard of them. I do not regret any of it. The experience was real and some of it was genuinely good.
But participating in the algorithmic machine has taken a toll I can no longer ignore.
Twitter was my big one. I left it and came back more times than I care to count. Each time I stepped away my mental health visibly improved. Each time I returned I was fresher, clearer, more present. That pattern, repeated over years, is telling. The machine was doing something to me, and distance from it made me better.
What finally got me off Twitter for good was Mastodon. You cannot take a drug away from an addict and expect recovery — it is a gradual process of replacement. Mastodon gave me a substitute that felt healthier: no algorithm, no engagement optimization, no outrage engine. It worked. I have been Twitter-free for a couple of years now.
And yet here I am again, feeling the pull to disconnect — this time from the fediverse itself.
This is harder to explain precisely, but I will try. I do not think the fediverse is bad. The problem is subtler than that. I believe that twenty years of algorithmic feeds have altered how people behave online — all of us, myself included. The patterns are baked in now. The way people post, react, pile on, perform. The fediverse does not have an algorithm, but it is full of people whose brains were shaped by one. You cannot escape that just by changing the platform.
There is also something more fundamental that I keep coming back to. Internet people are not real people — not in the sense that matters. Spending hours a day with strangers online instead of with the people physically in my life is, once again, costing me something I cannot easily get back.
So I am done with feeds. All of them. Algorithmic or not, curated or chronological — I do not want content delivered to me on a schedule someone else controls. What I want is what worked in 1998: a list of bookmarked blogs from people I genuinely find interesting, visited when I choose to visit them, on my own terms.
No feed. No refresh. No machine.
Just people writing things, and me deciding when to read them.
If mastodon is my new addiction — you will see me again.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://linuxrenaissance.com/post/feeds/
