One Month Without Social Media

At the end of December, I wrote about the Analog January Challenge and that I'm going to skip Twitter and Mastodon for a month. This is a report on how it went and what it will change in my life.

In the first days, I noticed my urge to read my whole Twitter and Mastodon timelines when weaking up, when I got a spare minute during the day and before going to sleep. That were my usual social media slots.

With disabling all notifications (I never had them enabled in the first place) and removing the app icons from my phone, they were gone for a month. I never started them once.

After maybe three days, I've forgotten about social media for the most part. It was only a few times, where I found something on the Internet that I would have loved to share. After a week, as if I had never started using social media.

This was very similar to my experience with my Twitter Lent from 2017.

Social media is not my only source of information. I follow lots of RSS/Atom feeds which is maybe my most important source. I watch the evening news of our national broadcast station (ZIB2). I read a weekly magazine on paper (Falter).

This way, I never felt "out of the world" or similar.

My assumption was that I may publish more blog articles. This was certainly true for the first nine days of the year. That was not solely related to my social media experiment. I did not work and a planned vacation was canceled due to the Omicron wave. So I found more time for blogging and I enjoyed it.

As a consequence, I was not able to promote my articles via social media. This might be the reason why January had maybe a third less visits than the previous months.

I almost forgot about the first of February and the end of this experiment. I also do have very limited urges to start with Twitter and Mastodon again. At least the same way as before.

Maybe I stop reading my full time-lines as I've did ever since. Maybe I use them mostly for promoting my blog article content. Maybe I'll fall back to my old habits after a few weeks. Who knows?

At least I've confirmed that my level of addiction is still very low to non-existent although I was very actively using social media.