Recently I have been considering my use of ‘Social Media’ or perhaps more accurately, how social media uses me. I deleted all of my posts from instagram. There were many reasons behind this, partly its abhorrent use of ‘Ai’; Zuckerberg can fuck himself to all the Hells. My main reason though was my growing dislike of it.

On March 11th 2023 at about 9:30 my house caught fire. I escaped, wearing only the clothes on my back. The Fire Brigade rescued my cat.

The first image is the bedroom, the second obviously, is my cat.

Everything was destroyed, either burned or smoke damaged.

To cut a very long, and to me a difficult story, short. I was diagnosed with CPTSD and OCD. Given that mental health has always been low on the list of priorities for any Government, and even more with the self serving, robbing fuckers over the last 14 years, I struggled to find help.

Its a hard thing to see an entire life go up in flames, even harder to be reminded of it on an almost daily basis.

I didn’t ask, but lots of truly wonderful people from Twitter/Mastodon helped raise some money to get me through. I was and still am humbled by this. This is what makes my decision to walk away from Social Media a little harder.

Instagram and Mastodon were easy to walk away from. The former I rarely used, the latter became hellish for me. I struggle with words, you’ll know this if you are still reading, and the alt-text brigade hammered me. Despite offering reasons, such as I have monochromacy, it wasn’t enough for them. They wanted an entire journal written to describe an image. There are certain people who will take a useful thing such as alt text and turn it into a way to force others to comply with their vison of what social media should be.

I turned to Bluesky, my experience there has been a lot better than either Instagram or Mastodon. I dislike intensely the labelling/list aspect of it. The fact that you can fall foul of someone without ever interacting with them and end up on a widely distributed and used list is very off putting. As an example of this I found out I was on a JK Rowling supporters list, despite never reading any of her stuff or indeed posting about her.

I firmly agree with blocking muting etc but the labelling/list aspect to me is wrong, expecially in the hands of volunteers, despite having the best intentions.

These though are minor quibbles, at the end of the day its my choice to stay or not. Perhaps I will reconsider leaving Bluesky, I have given myself to the end of June.

I’ll continue this post at a later date, where I’ll touch on the hellscape that is fire insurance.