I’ve come to the conclusion I follow way too many sites, people, or products on social media. I find myself scrolling the different sites and rarely stopping, mainly because I am uninterested. And I’m on a few networks, Nostr, Threads, Mastodon, BlueSky, and Facebook. 

If I’m not stopping a lot, it because I am uninterested, or it’s repetitive, at least that’s my assumption. On almost all but Facebook, which I will explain later, I initially followed a lot of accounts I thought would be interesting, so there would be something in the feed initially. This has backfired for what I consider one major reason, I misjudged my own interests. 

Let me explain. I am pretty techie in my tools, and in my work. It has come easy to me. This makes me follow a lot of techie accounts. Of course, some do interest me at times, but I’m finding the things I seem to stop at more often have nothing to do with tech. I like to see animals, things about agriculture, music, religion, writing, the indieweb (i guess this is tech), heartwarming stories, and peoples thoughts on life and the spirit. Again, some kind of tech news now and again, but these days I find it bores me. 

So, I’m not going to blanket delete everyone, not all at once. What I plan on doing is, as I notice I pass an account enough, I will just unfollow. Nothing against them, but why litter the feed, if I’m not reading it anyway. Then I am going to seek out those who do catch my attention, ones who more often or not I stop to see what they have to say. 

The Exception

Facebook, it’s a love hate relationship. Of all the social networks, it is the most useful, and maybe the most troublesome. What Facebook has going for it is all the people I love or have interacted with in real life are there. Some of them say a lot I don’t agree with, or I haven’t seen in a decade or more, but we have that real world connection. They have been or are currently a part of my life, and I don’t want to lose those connections. It also is great at creating communities in real life. I am a member of a farm co-op, local naturalist groups, and a local community group that are all super useful and informative. In the end, Facebook is the one social network with people that are completely real to me, thus it’s harder to prune. 

Let me see how this goes, and see if it improves the social experience with the rest of the people in the world, I don’t really know. I really feel social media when used properly is a great tool for connecting with the rest of the world, if I can get better at filtering out the noise. 

Cheers!