I’ve spent the past couple of weeks conducting a bit of an experiment on myself.
I’ve been floating around the Fediverse for a little while now. I’d left Facebook years ago, and deleted Twitter around the same time it got all Musked up. I spent the majority of my time on Mastodon, but my two holdouts from “traditional” social media were Instagram and TikTok.
Instagram, like its parent Facebook, feeds off of FOMO (fear of missing out) and I realized that it had gotten to the point where it had no redeeming qualities for me.
TikTok was amusing at times, but was ultimately just empty calories. Endless scrolling with nothing to show for it afterwards.
I didn’t even bother deleting my accounts. I just unceremoniously removed the apps from my phone. Nothing really interesting about that.
But then I installed the Kindle app, and I moved the icon to where the Instagram icon was on my home screen. And then when muscle memory would pull my thumb to that area I’d find myself “doomscrolling” a book rather than mindless social media posts that I didn’t care about.
And I know, I know. Amazon is evil, don’t give billionaire Uncle Jeff more money. I totally get it, but I had a small stockpile of impulse-buy books on there from BookBub emails. I decided that since I had already paid for them, might as well get my money’s worth?
I’ve finished three books in the past couple of weeks. This may not sound like a whole lot, but it’s more than I’ve managed to finish in the past few years and it feels like a good start to my experiment. And I don’t miss Instagram or TikTok in the slightest.
All that’s left now is to kick Reddit to the curb…