after a few weeks on mastodon without much thought about twitter i’ve noticed a distinct change in my own mood.
i think twitter force-feeding us rage inducing tweets every day was having more of an impact on my psyche than i care to admit.
i didn’t follow much politics and always used Twitteriffic — but the people i followed retweeted their algorithmic rage all day every day.
i really feel like i owe someone a thank you for giving me this piece of my life back that’s been missing for years.
my post continues to resonate with folks. i’m so glad.
i almost didn’t write it. but i had mentioned to a friend a couple days ago that i felt embarrassed i was by my mood change.
i had been letting twitter control my mood — probably for years. i really thought with good filters and so forth, i was in control. i felt in control. i wasn’t.
only the sudden change made it visible enough to finally notice.
> the people i followed retweeted their algorithmic rage all day every day.
I wonder how we can fix that for good. CWs are part of the puzzle perhaps, but people use them less and less and even argue that people “need to be informed”.
@chucker people need to hear bad news too.
but i don’t need to hear only the worst news all day every day from all my friends.
i find a few on mastodon talk about awful things a bit and then moves on to things that are more tangible in their life like their work and their family.
it doesn’t seem to artificially keep circling back to the most rage-inducing news over and over like it did on twitter.
it feels much healthier. at least to me.
>people need to hear bad news too.
They do — but sometimes, all I wanna do is sit by the lake and watch the ducks. (Also gives me energy to participate in the next political fight.)
>people need to hear bad news too.
Yeah. Seems much better so far. :-)
@WTL i thought this for brief moment too.
but, you know what… no. no thanks. fuck that guy. and all his fascist friends too.
i’m going to give my thanks to Eugen and all the awesome weirdos over here for keeping mastodon going all this time and accepting us all in our hour of need.
space karen’s reusable landing rockets are pretty neato tho. i’ll give him that one.
:-)
@isaiah yes. This happened to me. I used TweetDeck and never set region on Twitter. So when I saw people mad for something was weird, because all would start the rage at the same time, almost as it was something artificial.
For a time I suspected troll centers doing this for political advance (that happened before in my country) but now I believe it was just Twitter's algorithms telling them that their world is ending.
After a few weeks I notice how I've become more positive overall.
@albertkinng i’ll go when the icon factory app when it arrives.
but so far i like Toot (because it supports dyslexic fonts) and Ivory.
I haven’t really found something i like on mac yet.
@TammyGentzel @annedraya oddly it never appealed to me. the exact opposite really. it made me use twitter less and less.
but the 2nd hand smoking sort of impact it was having in my psyche sure was something. maybe not addicting per se — but potent for sure.
@Yup_Its_Holly “rage farming” is a great description — i’ve never heard that one before did you just make that up? so apropos.
i might have to steal that one. 😁
A very cool thing about Mastodon is that I’m not constantly seeing the dumbest of debates like “is SwiftUI production ready?” I didn’t even use the algorithmic timeline, but since those tweets performed well the algorithm would rank those tweets highly and inject them into the timeline of anyone I followed who used the algorithmic timeline. Then the people I followed would tweet their own takes, which meant I was constantly being bombarded with the dumbest of takes even though I used Tweetbot.
Absofukinglutely! Today was a good day to wear moose...
@davidfwall and i think the answer is Eugen and all the dedicated people here — and of course, the wonderfully weird folks here that didn’t feel comfortable on the hellsite — basically keeping the spot warm for us until we got here.
backing your instance is a great way to give back. co-signed.
@isaiah I've noticed something similar.
I may not be posting a lot, but I do read a bit. In the time I'd normally be doomscrolling on the bird site I've found myself just scrolling through and reading about interesting people sharing interesting things about themselves and what they are doing on Mastodon.
I've found this reading to be far more pleasant than what I did doomscrolling before. Enough so that it is difficult to spend much time back at the bird site without questioning why I am doing it, and then returning here.
Thankyou very much for sharing that thought! :)
I deleted my twitter account about three months ago.
Best decision I've made in a long time.
@stevestreza i did the same. for 90% of my feed i only saw people's organic tweets. but i think it's only so useful.
you can quit smoking but it's not going to make a difference if you hang out all day in a bar with chainsmokers.
i feel like even if i followed mostly people that were filtering their feed, the algorithm was still polluting the river upstream or something. and it's tireless -- eventually its relentless push refocuses some people back toward rage-farming for dollars.
@neilgall exactly exactly.
i had the same experience with facebook but hadn’t kicked twitter.
instagram is still on my phone — but it’s killed itself. every time i open it i just 🤮.
@mysturji yes. but also no.
actually nope. not gonna thank that guy at all!!!
i’ll thank Eugen for keeping Mastodon waiting for us.
but I’m not going to tip the axeman after he lops off my head — even if he does a very fine job of it.
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