Two months on from abandoning the socials ...

A couple of months ago I decided to abandon social media. 

No Insta, no Facebook, no Twitter, and none of the things like Tumblr and Pinterest that sneaked in as part of an experiment and decided to stay for lunch.

It’s true that I’m still on Mastodon where basically I’m a lurker. While I do post and comment occasionally on more serious things, in the main I’m just there for the train porn.

It’s also true that I still blog - my three blogs are really three parallel themed diaries with a bit of crossover, and of course I’m still putting together my wiki of newsworthy history and archaeology links, but as much for my own benefit as anything.

So, how’s it going?

Pretty good, actually. I have no temptation to go back and am happy enough to squat in my corner. I’m reading more, which is good, and I think I’m possibly less of a grasshopper than I was and able to focus more.

The only real problem is these idle ten minutes when you’re waiting for a bus, or in a doctor’s, when one might normally scroll through the socials for something to do, I do get a little twitchy - almost like when I kicked my Gauloise habit over 40 years ago, and even when the cravings had  gone I didn’t quite know what to do with my hands.

In the old days of course one would have read the paper or one of these tatty five year old National Geographics that you find in doctor’s waiting rooms. Actually you don’t any more - they banished the magazines as an infection risk at the start of the pandemic, and they havn’t come back.

Newspapers are of course largely a thing of the past since we gave up having a paper halfway through the pandemic, but as a substitute I do have a couple of news apps on my phone, pocket for saved articles, and if I know its going to be a day with a lot of hanging around I take the dogfood tablet with me with some stuff to read. 

(It’s a valid question, given both the Oppo’s excellent battery life, and that the Oppo’s screen is only about 10% smaller than the dogfood tablet’s whether, if I was to ditch my iPhone in favour of using the Oppo as my full time phone I’d need to take the dogfood tablet with me as an extra device)

But, basically, it’s working for me, and I see no need to go back the socials, I just need to master the twitches a little better ...