I actually appreciate social media blocking my connections

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This might be a little controversial but I actually really like that so many social media websites have introduced login walls in the past year or two.

Before, I would spend my entire day just infinitely scrolling past posts that I was fundamentally uninterested in, but too pathetic to simply stop. At the end of the day, while lying in bed, I would try to remember what I did that day, but nothing would come to mind.

In a way, I am happy that Musk took over Twitter and basically made it impossible to use without an account. Reddit has recently started blocking all VPN connections. Facebook and Instagram have been unusable without an account for a while now.

Mastodon and Lemmy are filled with nerds who only talk about Linux drama, something I am not at all interested in, so it’s easy to simply not use them, or only look at one post I’m interested in and then close the website.

Since I would mostly look at posts in (American) English, I would only get American news (and really biased ones too, with clickbait headlines from random untrusty websites). I didn’t know what was happening in my country, because it wasn’t served right under my nose.

In my opinion, social media is the most widely accepted addiction in society.

Now that the time I was using to browse social media has been freed up, I started reading more books, comic books, articles, listening to more music, playing more video games, watching more films, I started going to theatres, galleries and exhibitions and just generally I am more engaged with culture around me.

Even if whatever I was reading/watching/playing/whatever wasn’t any good, it’s something I will remember. If someone asks me 2 years from now what my thoughts on “xyz” are, I will say “Xyz was awful!!! I never want to see anything from that artist again!”

I started writing a journal for my personal use, where I write down every piece of media I engage with, along with my own “reviews.” This quickly became one of my favourite hobbies.

Anyway, that’s it. Obviously this is entire thing horrible for the open internet, but in a selfish way, I like it.

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Well, social media sites being publicly accessible was already horrible for the open internet, because if you had a Twitter/FB/Reddit/whatever page that was accessible to the public without an account, then why would you need a website?

I think there has been a resurgence in independent websites lately. I’d probably prefer it if both could co-exist, but since the free market basically demands only one or the other is successful, then the centralized social media platforms dying is fine with me.