I’ve deactivated Facebook and either deactivated or simply logged out of Insta and Threads; it’s hard to tell because the process of FB deactivation was such a mess that I’m not sure whether it affected the other Meta accounts.
As smitten as I have been with Bluesky, I admit that I miss Threads a little. It dawned on me that although I found some lovely people there, the platform as a whole had begun to annoy me. I got tired of Threads forcing the algorithm down my throat and making it awkward to turn to the chronological follow-only feed. And the spike in engagement bait, obviously scraped material, and cloying, performative posts just made it harder to stick around there. The migration of bots and trolls just pushed me over the edge.
That said, I was somehow not terribly self-conscious there. I became more real about personal stuff on Threads, and it was nice to know only a handful of people there from real life. (I even blocked people I knew from real life or other platforms because I liked the anonymity so much.) And people were nice and welcoming about that honesty. I began to own the idea that at almost 60, I have almost no fucks left to give.
But on Bluesky, I’ve begun trying too hard to be witty or smart; the self-consciousness I nursed – the fucks I gave in my previous social media experiences – has resurfaced, and I don’t like it.
I need to be real. I don’t need the fucks.