A Good kind of Social Media

06 Feb, 2025

Reading Time: 15 minutes

Perhaps you may have noticed, social media has been getting really bad lately. Like not just a few annoying features, it's becoming properly terrible. Intentionally bad. They're adding malicious annoying features, things that feel designed to distract you, designed to keep you using their stupid app longer than you wanted to. If you've felt it, you're not crazy. They really are doing these things on purpose.

The polite term for this phenomenon is Platform Decay. It's most notably been discussed by Cory Doctorow as "enshittification". If you'd like to learn more about it, you can give him a search online, but here's my briefest explanation as to how it works, so as not to bore the already informed:

The corporations make money the longer you're online. You don't want to be online all day. Therefore, there's a competition between you and the company as to how long you'll actually spend. They know your main goal is just to see what your friends have posted, so their first attack is to throw in junk posts from the explore page into your home feed that you can't disable, so as to slow you down from catching up with everything. Beyond that, they might add TikTok-style vertical videos with infinite scrolling into every corner of the app they can fit it into.

They get away with it because they know you can't leave. Your friends aren't posting anywhere else, so they get to mess with you a lot before they see you go.

The overall result is that we spend more time on our phones, consuming crappy, short form content that leaves us feeling scared, anxious, or insecure. Even if the posts aren't creating these negative emotions in us, what they're sure to do is create an addiction for short-form dopamine responses. I've taken to calling content like this "Dopamine Addiction Content". It's Ipad Baby slop, and as a culture, we're eating it up for some reason. We're all addicted.

It seems that today, it's not at all uncommon to hear that most your friends are spending 4 hours or more a day just tapping on their phones. For many, that's a short estimate, and their average usage is closer to around 8 hours a day, just on social media, not including other apps.

The problem stems from the amount of power that these corporations have over us. Critics of social media will often head over to the camp that says this is an inherent issue with social media as a concept. That this is just the logical conclusion of the invention. I would reject this claim. I do not believe that online interaction with friends should somehow lead you to be spending this much time on your phone, especially when most of that time is often spent scrolling through posts from accounts you don't even follow. No, the problem isn't in social media as an idea, but instead in the way it's being run. The current model is flawed.

The Solution

If the problems of social media are created because of the current model, then that begs the question as to what model we should be using instead? We need a model that doesn't promote a corporation to come in and control every aspect of its use, destroy any features that allow users to regain control, and inject anti-features meant to distract you further.

In addition to that, we need to see the new platform as meaningfully different, not simply an ethically purer version of the same old product. We need to approach it in a whole new light.

Non-corporate

A good kind of social media would not be owned by a singular corporation who could decide on a whim to institute the same malicious practices that the existing platforms are already using. Maybe there's multiple platforms that achieve this, but the only major one that has actually done it correctly is the dorkily-named "Fediverse"¹.

I could bore you with technical descriptions, or I could simply say that nobody "owns the fediverse" (an idea almost as ridiculous as trying to "own email" or "own the internet"). Different groups can host portions of it (like how different organizations can own parts of the internet by hosting websites online), but the whole thing is a group project. All you do as a user is pick a home "instance" to sign up with. The home instance is kind of like a city. Each city has it's own rules for moderation and what is allowed on there -- most ban illegal content and spam, sometimes they also ban overt hatred or things like that, but if you don't like that, you can always pick an instance that doesn't ban it. Notably, if you live in one instance and I live in another, we can both see each others posts still and interact just the same as if we were on the same one.

If ever an instance were to "turn evil", trying to get us addicted, distract us, and feed us dopamine addiction content intended to somehow drive up profits, we could just leave. Once we moved to a different instance, we would still be able to talk to our old friends (who didn't move instances), but now without the evil corporation trying to control us.

How should we use this new platform?

Okay, so let's say we all switch to the Fediverse. What then? In my opinion, this would be the real test right here for many who are critical of this idea. You see, up until this point, we've been handed the script on what social media is supposed to do, and how we're supposed to use it, from the corporations. Now that we're free to use it how we want, I think a lot of people would just fall into using it the way they were taught to. And so a lot of that dopamine addiction content would be present on there. We would be scrolling through the app like it's a toy. Some might decide to go through the explore page once they run out of friends' posts to scroll, and get upset when the explore page isn't interesting enough to engage them for multiple hours a day.

My advice

So then what are we to do instead? I suppose that depends on what kind of person you are, but here I'll offer my advise. Feel free to take what you like and ignore anything you don't, as it's reflective of my own tastes.

Curate your following

First and foremost, we should be putting our actual, real friends at the center. The friends who you actually talk to in life, and the ones you would say hi to if you saw them at the store. Most people don't actually have more than a dozen friends or so, and that's a good thing. The more friends you have, the less close you become with any of them. So, we should be focusing our key, actually close friends.

In addition to those really close friends, some people might throw in some of the less intimate friendships as well. It really just depends what your social network looks like, but as long as you feel like the content they post is actually meaningful to you, then do it. I would say it's probably a mistake to add so many people that your feed takes more than about 5 or 10 minutes a day to read, maybe longer if you spend time actually interacting with the posts.

After that, you might follow a small number of content creators like journalists, hobbyists, or writers who have something worthwhile for you to see on their profile. I would say that posts from this category should make up a small fraction of your feed.

Remove distracting features

Some people might really disagree with this point, but in my view it's a necessary step. I would advise everyone to go into your app settings and remove the "explore" button. This is easy to do on Fediverse apps, and can usually be cleanly accomplished in mere seconds. If you can't figure it out, the internet will tell you how to take care of it. I feel like most explore feed content on any app is just low-quality slop. If you don't already know the user, you probably don't actually need to see what they're talking about. If you ever want to increase your network, looking at the following lists of your friends is probably more productive than finding random accounts that made trending posts. This way, there's an actual context to the connection.

You should also turn off all notifications. Your friends' updates can wait until you have time. They will still be there in the coming hours or days until you open it again, no need to create anxiety for nothing. Direct Messaging through the app could be a possible exception, although it's my personal opinion that regular texting using your phone number will always be superior to using a social media app that's full of distractions, unless you're replying directly to a post that somebody made through the app.

Post genuinely

You may post a lot, or not at all. Both options are fine. All social networks will have people on both ends, and it's probably a good thing, I don't know. But if you do post, make it genuine, human. Post about your day, or the things you've been up to, or stuff you read about. Don't drown out your followers with endless memes and reposts of vaguely interesting content. That kind of behavior is exactly the thing corporate social media was training you to do, and which we want to avoid if at all possible. It hides any kind of insight into how a person is doing behind a mask. Posting a meme that relates to your current mood might be fun once in a while, but when it's just about the only way you express yourself online, it's a sign that you don't feel comfortable around the people you've allowed on your friends list.

Turn the app off

You go on, you check out what your friends are up to, then you get off. The app shouldn't be something you open whenever you're bored. It shouldn't be a filler activity at all. You either want to check your feed, or you don't. You either put your full attention to this for a few minutes, or you don't open it. This is the only healthy way to approach social media once you realize that you shouldn't be treating it as a toy, but as a tool for social connection.

A short list of curated accounts -- mostly friends -- that you follow shouldn't take very long to keep up with updates on. A lot of people don't even post that often. If you find yourself bored for a few minutes and want something to do, find a different activity. Play a mobile game if you must, that's what helped me to wean off my dopamine addiction, as I slowly started to develop strategies for coping with boredom other than incessant scrolling.

Closing

I'll leave it up to you to decide whether my vision of the future could be possible, as well as whether my fears about dopamine addiction content are justified. To close, I'll leave you with a link to Dan Fixes Coin-Ops's creative writing thread, where he envisions a future from the perspective of the user, existing in a world where social media seeks to help, rather than harm. It's a great read, even if you think I'm full of shit. I really do recommend checking it out, it's a lot of what inspired me to even begin working on this piece.