Abandon Social Media

Social media is nothing but a disease whose only remedy is amputation. They're nothing more than public spying platforms designed to psychologically manipulate users, promote the acceptance of immorality, advertising, constant surveillance, and conformity, as well as the employment of "content moderation" (i.e., censorship, see: Against Moderation) as a weapon with the ability to restrict movement by removing the content they "deem inappropriate." Whether the platforms are centralized or decentralized, they're all walled gardens in the sense that you're supposed to log into them to view the posts that you want, which are buried in the ever growing sea of goyslop, brainrot, and misinformation.

Take X/Twitter for example, there's just no "algorithm" to it; no matter how many retarded accounts you block, the posts of the brown fascist Cambodian tradcath kingpin of the site will always keep reappearing on your feed, along with a reply from (((Elon Musk))) where he tries to express his "concern" over "The Great Replacement," because the algorithm is literally designed that way now. If you try to escape these posts, you'll also be met with a horde of (literal or "in essence") Indian polytheists hidden behind pro-Zionist MAGA accounts and a bunch of noodle-armed ultra-Aryan lolicon accounts whose only job is to retweet delusional sociopolitical misinformation, or tweet about the most violently homosexual and incestuous thing you've ever read.

We also have Discord (a community-hyperfocused bastard child of social media, forums, and chat groups), which is not only the most well-known Chinese proprietary piece of spyware that constantly keeps useful features behind a paywall (or removes them altogether), but also the reason why so many communities have broken apart; it killed almost every forum online (along with all online cultures and identities) and instead centralized media into groups populated and managed by mostly awful people. Joining any Discord server takes zero effort or investment, pretty much anyone can join any group with no strings attached, then simply lurk around and never interact with anyone or even read what's going on inside of that group. Unlike IRC and similar chatting services (where "presence" is highly valued), there's no obligation whatsoever for a Discord user to ever contribute to the group in any way, mostly because the user is part of far more groups than he should be in at once, which would also take away time used to bond and make friendships with others, and as such, Discord makes forgetting (or ghosting) people seem like a trivial thing to do.

Afterwards, we've got YouTube videos, which are anything but simple nowadays, and getting to the point is seemingly becoming a near impossible skill to master. Back in the old days, videos contained 100% content, but these days, almost all videos follow the exact same pattern; a video would be 20-35 minutes long, full of sponsorship, irrelevancies, and 4-6 unskippable ads throughout the video, all accompanied with a thumbnail where they make a Gapejak face out of themselves, an all-caps clickbait title, and a description that's almost entirely links to their setup, socials, alt accounts, and some retarded book they're selling on Amazon. I understand that this is pure YouTube pressure as they have to make videos this way in order to squeeze as much ad revenue as possible (which is getting harder and harder to get with each passing year), but when "content creators" create actual garbage, they'd better find another job instead; art isn't supposed to be taken as a job with expected payment, but rather as a hobby done for enjoyment and dedication to public audiences. I used to like many YouTubers back then (such as Computerphile, Luke Smith, Mental Outlaw, TVFilthyFrank, Vinesauce, Vargskelethor, Vsauce, HololiveEN, even PewDiePie at one point), but now I only watch a few friends' recommendations sporadically, because YouTube videos in general got extremely boring nowadays (similar to TV shows).

Then, we have social media platforms built up solely on the short-form content model, which is nothing but even worse. Most people nowadays, just as they finish working or their daily routines (or even at the start of their day for some), they open YouTube, Instagram, or TikTok, and begin swiping up endlessly to begin watching random shorts/reels/posts as a form of entertainment. However, the problem is with the mindless quick swiping, which leads to an emotional whiplash, affecting mental health in a deeper way than we think. The constant and rapid-fire consumption of different emotions induce harmful side effects such as anxiety, stress, and emotional instability, because our brains aren't conditioned to receiving contradictory feelings in a very short timeframe. Just like taking drugs, this temporary sense of euphoria reduces the ability to enjoy real-life moments as they become too "boring," since such a brain is used to quick doses of emotions rather than the realistic slow-paced rhythm of events, which may sometimes require deep thought and concentration (something that all short-form content consumers lack).

The Solution ~

Based on this perception, instead of using social media, I'm of the belief that anyone who has any content worth sharing to public audiences would own a website as a personal platform of his own, especially if it respects the Superiority of Asynchronous Visual Communication by making the website read-only; basically, abandoning Web 2.0 in favor of Web 1.0, as I have mentioned in Better Internet > Ecosystem > Personal Websites. This solution allows people to maintain everything themselves, so they can post whatever they want in whatever way they want in an accessible way and without any worries of content moderation. Personal websites also eliminate the problem of "toxicity," because they seclude and quarantine people (and their personal ideas) to their own spaces; that way, if you don't want to see a certain website whose content you may potentially dislike, all you can do is just not to look at it or block it out of your reach.

As for keeping track of the many personal websites that may accumulate in your bookmarks (or even forum threads, comment sections, some social media accounts you can't give up on, YouTube subscriptions, podcasts, news aggregators, torrent releases, Git repositories, etc.) without having to visit a dozen separate sites every day, an indispensable solution exists through the usage of RSS (Really Simple Syndication), which, if implemented by said website, makes its content available in the form of a feed that uses a standardized XML format, and that can be viewed on RSS reading clients (I use the TUI-based newsraft on my Dotfiles). There's also Atom, which was created to address some issues and concerns with the original RSS which was fixed with RSS 2.0, so most RSS clients treat RSS and Atom as the same format. You can thus aggregate multiple feeds in one place by using an RSS/Atom reader which checks for updates from feeds and allows you to categorize and tag them, saving time and making for a much more enjoyable experience.

Some of these websites explicitly provide an RSS link which you can paste as a new feed in your RSS reader. Most of them, however, provide RSS implicitly and in a hidden way, mostly for nefarious reasons (as well as it not being common anymore). RSS allows a decentralized and open way of keeping track of content, which is antithetical to the modern economy based on attention-seeking. Many organizations want users to visit their bloated, botnet, algorithm-heavy, proprietary JavaScript-ridden site to sign into an account or subscribe to a newsletter via email (for revenue, greater marketing pull and data collection purposes). For instance, Twitter used to support RSS in the very beginning until the company grew larger, when the top executives at Twitter realized that it hurts sign-ins and thus hurts ad revenue, so they took it away (it's still available on third-party Nitter instances). YouTube also removed the RSS button, but still naively allows you to make RSS feeds (using https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=[id], where [id] is the channel's ID).

In any case, if RSS provision is implicit on said website and you can't find the RSS icon anywhere on it, you can either find it on the page's source (e.g., by searching for "rss," "rssUrl," "feed," or "atom" in the HTML's "head" tag) or you can bruteforce it by adding feed/feed.rss/index.xml/rss.xml/blog.atom at the end of the site's URL, if online searches don't give any useful leads. You can also find it in an RSS directory (like RSS Bridge) or some RSS feed generators (such as this one for MangaDex). In addition, if a website is open-source (like this one), you can keep track of every change by subscribing to its Git repository's RSS feed.