At the beginning of the year I took I want to say close to 2 months off social media. I stayed off the two platforms I have accounts on (Mastodon & Bluesky), I deleted the apps and signed out of my desktop sessions. I have since returned to the platforms, but I'm still trying to figure out how I want to handle my use of social media.

There's a lot of hate aimed at social media about how it affects people's mental health. I personally believe that much of this is really better suited to be handled on a case by case basis as it can affect people in drastically different ways, not always negatively.

With that said, for me personally, after Trump won the elections in both 2016 and 2024, I definitely felt social media became a drain on my mental health. So often it's become doomscrolling, wondering what fresh hell he's caused this time. And if the only people I followed on social media only posted political content, it'd be an easy 'delete my account' decision. But it's not the case.

One of the things that kept me on Twitter back in the day was the developer community. There was always someone posting about a cool little project they were working on or some cool new trick you could do with CSS. Twitter/X is now a nazi bar, but fortunately the cool kids all migrated to Bluesky and Mastodon.

This is pretty much the reason I haven't deleted my accounts and why I'm still at least active on the platforms. The developer community is pretty awesome and I love seeing the different things people are working on, or how they're building out their personal sites. I see this a lot more on Mastodon, but the community is there on Bluesky as well.

I've been trying to limit my screen time lately as well, irregardless of my mental health, I started to notice I was again developing the habit of just mindlessly scrolling on my phone. I deleted Bluesky from my phone, but kept Mastodon. My thought there was that because Mastodon for me is much more dev/tech focused, the mindless scrolling is somewhat more limited as I'm more likely to find something worth clicking into that will provide more depth or value. Part of this is most certainly me making excuses for myself, but I still think there's something to be said about an article on how to better use CSS Grid than random shitposts or however many posts providing detailed points why America has slipped into facism.

I have in the past pruned who I followed. I think at the very least, I need to do this. On Twitter back in the day, I did a mass purge of who I followed and really got rid of a lot of the newsy-political accounts. Twitter had the ability to add accounts to your lists without actually following them. And in a twist of fate that I discovered while writing this, it appears Bluesky offers that same functionality. Mastodon still does not it would seem. This was nice because it allowed me to unfollow them while also not completely unfollow them when I wanted to delve down the more newsy feed.

And while I definitely prefer Mastodon over Bluesky, I was listening to Mike Masnick on a podcast the other day talking about Bluesky (disclaimer: he is on Bluesky's board) and was talking about custom feeds and some of the tooling being built around them. I've started following some custom feeds for things like MLB, Star Trek, & Devs. They're actually a pretty cool feature that allows for you to follow custom algorithms to follow certain topics. But one thing Mike mentioned was that some of the tooling is getting more in-depth and could allow for filtering certain content depending on the day or other criteria. It's something I'll have to keep an eye on.

Still though, I've been trying to find a way to strike the right balance between enjoying Mastodon & Bluesky while also balancing screen time and my mental health. There's probably an argument to be made that if I'm concerned, it might be time to completely disconnect. And while I wouldn't completely dismiss that, I suspect there might still be a balance somewhere.

Do any of you have any tips, tricks, hacks, or anything that helps you with your social media use?