Sunday, December 19th, 2021, 14:56

Mood: Sore

So, about two weeks ago now, I quit using Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. I reached a pretty low point with my mental health and realized I needed to get my shit together and stop acting like I was okay. Anyway, the only thing I've really missed during this little experiment are two things:

TikTok, naturally.

And expressing myself and connecting with people who are expressing their selves as well.

I've for about four years now tried to find ways to participate online that don't involve using the "big" social media platforms, e.g. Meta's apps... well, I mostly just mean Meta's apps. The difficult part is that everyone else is still using them, so I feel left out or out of the loop of things if I don't use them too. It's not that nobody can see what I'm up to--I don't care so much about that--but that I can't see what everyone else is up to. There was a period from about mid-2018 to early 2020 that I didn't use Facebook at all. Every time someone would begin a conversation with "Did you see on Facebook--" I wouldn't be able to participate. I want to know what the people I love are up to, but I'm sick of having to destroy my mental health in the process for it.

Here's the compromise I've settled on as I figure out where in the web I can situate myself without putting my mental health at risk:

1. "Cleaning" out my Facebook profile, i.e. I got this Chrome extension that sets all my past shit to "Only Me".
2. Not deactivating my Facebook profile, but only having it up so that I can see what other people are doing from time to time. No more daily doomscrolling.
3. Maintaining a more active presence on Neocities, SpaceHey, and Discord, to connect with other like-minded folks who are rejecting/eschewing the new web monopolies.
4. No more Instagram. We have data to show that this shit is just terrible for your body image.
5. Still gonna use TikTok lmao but just not as much.

So, yeah, if you're on here and you know me in real life, that's where you'll be able to check updates about me. I'm genuinely really sick of paying Zuckerberg with my mental health just because he's managed to monopolize social connectedness. I hate it. It feels so much evil-er and wrong-er than when I was still using Friendster in 2011 because Filipinos still were. It's sort of like when you have to start smoking in order to get a break from work, because your unethical employer says you don't need a break if it's not to smoke. Besides which, it's just fucking boring. Like, I'm sick of how uniform Facebook and Instagram all look, I'm sick of hearing the same 30-second clips on TikTok and getting them stuck in my head all day. I remember being Siren's age and the Internet was still cool. It's where I learned to code, before I hated myself for knowing how to code. I miss the web being used to make cool things, not just screen drugs.

Speaking of Siren, she's gotten pretty interested in what I'm doing today on Neocities, and says she wants a "vintage website" of her own. I regret to admit that teaching little kids, especially my own kid, really stresses me out. I mean, like, I kind of hate it. I hate myself for it but it's the truth. So I wanted to finish up what I'm doing on my own site today and then help her out with hers this afternoon. I really want to try to guide her in using the web creatively, not addictively--and I need to do that by setting a good example for her. After I hop off here I'll help her get her sea legs with the HTML and such. I wasn't much younger than her when I first coded on Geocities. It's so wild to watch the generational shift. I'm glad that there's options like this for her. It's always really disturbed and disappointed me how much more tech-savvy the millennial generation is than gen Z. On the one hand, it's cool that they don't have to struggle with things like destroying the family computer while pirating sketchy .mp3s and .mpegs. On the other, I feel like modern tech infrastructure is making my kid's generation incompetent, and it's annoying asf.

Anyway my muscles are all sore as shit. It's Siren's birthday weekend and we're winding down after her pool party. I forgot how much work it is to swim! No wonder people drown lol.