COVID caused the vast majority of my students in Japan to quit, go to online lessons or take an elongated break from taking lessons until COVID was over or at least settled down. So in addition to not being able to go out with friends, I generally didn’t have anyone to talk to.
I quit Facebook in 2016 and Instagram in 2022 or so. Photography is one of my few hobbies and I enjoyed posting my photos. They were popular, but I found myself taking photos JUST to be able to post them and also people would say that I was editing my photos or using software to enhance them. I rarely did that and even if I did, there’s no rule that I know against doing so. So I just quit Instagram rather than deal with the annoyances of it.
And I’m sorry to hear that 3/4 of your family is gone…but thankful you have your friends & PIC to keep you sane.
Can we try to be a ‘kindler, gentler’ world?
We just gotta get out of this hateful, revengeful attitude that’s out there!
I remember a song we learned and sang in Girl Scouts: ’ Peace I Ask of Thee Oh River". There are others, but that one was short and simple.
I’m sorry too. It is so important to find community, IME. Oddly, I have found that (judicious) social media has been so helpful to find kindred spirits. Specifically, my local FB Buy Nothing group and a bigger spin off group. The latter is having a holiday gift thing where you drop off little things for an opt in group of about 8 people. We are having so much fun with it and the gift giving hasn’t even begun.
During the 2011 earthquake & tsunami in northeastern Japan, I was able to use Twitter to help find an old friend’s parents. The friend was living on the westernmost island of Kyushu, but his parents lived in Iwate in northeastern Honshu…very far away. Despite the attempted use of multiple ways of contacting them, he was unable to do so.
I posted about that on Twitter and a friend in the city I lived in, Tokushima, saw my post. That friend is a booking agent for local musicians and he knew another booking agent in the area where my friend’s parents lived. My friend the booking agent asked the local booking agent to go to the address where the parents live and was able to confirm that they were safe.
I used Twitter daily for close to 15 years and stayed with it throughout all the troubles before and after the new owner purchased it because of how useful it was that one time and in other emergencies. But the antics of the owner became too much for me and I made the difficult decision to leave the site late last summer. Despite the upsides of social media, I don’t miss the anxiety of it (I have suffered from major depressive disorder for 30 years).
Social media absolutely has its positive aspects, but for me, the negative aspects have become too strong. Even here on HO, I often feel the need to stop looking and “liking” posts because it can cause me anxiety.
Thank you for understanding my idiosyncrasies and issues.
I was an early adopter of global online communication, hooking into BBS’s in the mid 80’s, to early Usenet in the late 80’s for college. I worked at NCSA as Mosaic (the first widely adopted web browser, that eventually morphed into Netscape) was being written. I saw the advent of “personal home pages” where people just spewed out willy nilly where they lived, their mother’s maiden names , the middle school they went to, and was horrified at the willing destruction of one’s personal info privacy. I did not participate. When MySpace and Twitter and Facebook came around, I had the same reaction. I have NEVER had accounts in any of the major ‘social’ networks (with the exception of Reddit, but that’s a different thing).
I don’t miss them. It has meant I occasionally will miss some event or special happening that only gets announced on instagram or something, but my mental health would undoubtedly suffer if I lived in those cesspools on the reg.
Stunningly, e-mail and texting still works to keep me in touch with a couple of cousins in the Midwest. I have no need for a more ‘frictionless’ connection to people I don’t already have a personal connection to.
Funny. I’ve never experienced such vitriol and open hatred than I have on the s/Reddit for Philly eats. Like fucking terriers on meth.
Takes a thick skin for sure, since the site seems to be barely moderated.
I need Facebook for my work & organizing many social events. I hate Facebook, but unfortunately haven’t found an alternative that enables me to do these things as successfully. Shame.
I tend to keep to my hobby interests (film, tv, etc) and a couple of local groups. And dumb cat pictures. Lots of those.
The utility/tolerability of any subreddit is directly proportional to the give-a-shit-ness of its moderation team.
There have been once useful subreddits that lost, for whatever reason, the one mod who kept things running, and they ultimately get inundated by bots, trolls, and spammers.
Because I had ran & later owned my own business (an English school) in Tokushima from 2009 to 2021, I felt a need to use social media (Facebook, Instagram & Twitter) as a free method of advertising. For that, it worked EXTREMELY well. I was also involved with a local filmmaker in Tokushima and we used both those sites to publicize the 3 movies we produced (I was involved in the music choices and English subtitles.)
In addition, because I had that school in Tokushima, on both Facebook & Twitter, I had to publish the school’s address and had to use my actual name. MAYBE because it was Japan, I was lucky enough to avoid any intrusion into my personal life. However, the police did show up one time when on Twitter, I criticized the incorrect English used on Japan’s national public television network, NHK. Of course, the police said they were visiting for another reason, I knew the real reason. After the police left, I quickly deleted the post and locked my account down hard.
I don’t regret my time on the social media sites I used because a lot of good came from them, but I honestly can’t see myself ever using FB/IG/“X” again.
For the past few years, I’ve been toying with the idea of working up a ‘tight five’ and doing some open mic nights. Not because I have any real ambition to be a famous stand up comic, but just to see if I could do it.
But I know, for a fact, that EVEN if, by some miracle, I turn out to be the funniest guy since George Carlin (thus instantly dating myself), I could never EVER actually be more than a local guy who could do a few clubs, just because I would absolutely HAVE to start self-promoting, and that would mean FB, and IG, and TikTok, and the whole idea makes me not even want to try, lest I somehow get pulled into it against my will.
In the words of Bette Davis, " Fasten your seat belts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!"
I’m a thinkin’ “ride” for the next 49-1/2 months. Buckle up!
Lots of ‘comfort foods’ will be necessary.
I just made an account on BlueSky. I don’t have FB, Instagram, TikTok, or even Threads, and since it’s impossible to read most of these others without an account … shrug.
