I came away from Facebook 6 years ago when i realised it was majorly effecting my mental health with its seriously toxic and witch hunting environment. Then came away from Twitter in Jan partly because I had made cupoftea.social and wasnt spending time there anymore but also found that place had turned toxic. Ive found in the 7 months of running my own mastodon instance that less is more. Less content but more meaningful interaction with other people and I go out the house more often.

I never really used social media because I had such massive social anxiety. But I did used Reddit (a short time) and YouTube

Reddit was easier because it had such montonic boring far-left content smeared everywhere. I just uninstalled the app and poof it was gone. I had urges to reuse it, but it was short lived

YouTube was much harder because of its very good recommendation algorithm. Even if I uninstalled it, I couldn’t stop myself from reinstalling it after a while. If I managed to keep the mobile app at bay, there was the desktop web version waiting for me. After a lot of infighting with my addicted brain, I now have NewPipe with all the Trending, Subscribed, New Videos crap disabled. And on the desktop side, I redirect youtube.com to piped.video, another non-addicting YouTube frontend

I couldn’t have been happier in my life before because of this small change

Honestly after leaving Reddit I can say that I already feel like my baseline mood has improved massively, just from not spending so much time every day scrolling through yet another school shooting and yet another life-hostile proposition by some Republican politician.

Generally it helps that Lemmy isn’t super US-centric (yet?).