On Social Media and Leaving Mastodon

This is my sixth attempt at using Mastodon, and I think it will be my last. I’ve had this account for one month and one day, and I’ve decided to delete it: not because of anything specific to Mastodon, but because I’ve concluded that I’m fundamentally incompatible with social media as a category.

Let me start with what actually worked. The Mastodon community is genuinely good. It’s largely made up of free and open source software enthusiasts and people who are passionate about their craft: the kind of people who cared enough to leave Twitter, which says something real about their commitment to their own values. I met smart people who shared my interests, especially around being intentional in life and intentional about how we use AI. For a while it felt like a clear, honest corner of the internet.

But over time the same pattern showed up that I recognize from Twitter and every other platform I’ve tried: checking my account almost daily, waiting for reactions, and feeling a mix of boredom and low-grade shame afterward, the sense that I’d spent my energy on something passive that gave me nothing back except noise I’d forget within ten minutes.

I don’t think this is a Mastodon problem. I think it’s structural.

The format works against real discussion. A 500-character limit is fine for a quip, not for an argument. You can thread posts, but a thread of fragments still isn’t the same as a genuinely developed idea. If I want to actually talk to people (ask questions, follow an argument, build a real connection), spaces built around real-time or long-form conversation, like Matrix rooms, IRC channels, or (with more caveats) Discord servers, do that far better. Communities built around a shared interest, whether it’s a Linux distro or a programming language, exist there too, and they’re built for exchange, not for broadcasting.

Mastodon is still a social media platform, whatever its other virtues. It doesn’t have Twitter’s algorithmic feed, but it has stars (its version of likes), boosts (its version of retweets), replies and follower counts. It’s less aggressive than Instagram’s or Twitter’s algorithms, but the underlying shape (post, wait, get a response, check again) is the same. That loop is what drives behavioral addiction on these platforms, not the specific ranking algorithm sitting on top of it.

And that loop plugs directly into some very normal human drives: to be seen, to be understood, to be approved of, to connect. Social media doesn’t invent those drives; it exploits them. That’s the part I think is genuinely unhealthy, independent of any one platform’s design choices.

This Isn’t New

This isn’t a one-off reaction to Mastodon. I’ve been here before, more than once.

I stopped using social media at 16, about four years ago, right around when short-form content started taking over. I was never a heavy user to begin with; Instagram was basically the only platform I touched seriously, yet I didn’t spend much time there: short-form content wasn’t that omnipresent back then, so about all I could do was spend my time thinking about what photo description to write, check friends’ stories or basketball accounts, or watch basketball news (I was really into basketball at the time).

At some point I decided to drop basketball in favor of intellectual pursuits: exploring ideas, focusing on my own growth. I no longer needed the news and highlights, and my reason for being on the platform shrank down to just checking on people I actually knew, since I had no interest in watching strangers or celebrities. That didn’t last either. I started to feel disgusted with myself, like I had no real reason to be there and was just wasting my mental energy. I realized I should be focusing on my own life instead of tracking everyone else’s, and I didn’t like the concept of false connection either: not everyone needs to stay in your life, and it’s fine to let some people go and focus on the ones closest to you.

I quit because of what it was doing to me: the constant comparison with classmates, the behind-the-back social games (who liked whose post, who commented on whose, who was being quietly left out). I was sick of it, and once I left, I was genuinely happier.

I went back to Instagram once, a while later, after moving to a new country, partly on the encouragement of someone I considered a friend at the time (we’re not in touch anymore). The reasoning was practical: I wanted to build connections in a new place. It lasted about a month before I deleted the account again, for the same reasons as before: I noticed I was wasting time on meaningless content, my attention was fragmented, and I wasn’t proud of how I was spending it.

I also tried Twitter several times, around three years ago, with a much more specific goal than “discovering the world”: I wanted to connect with other software engineers and computer science people, find real discussions, maybe build some kind of professional community. I never found it. What I found instead was a community that struck me as biased, negativity-oriented, and mostly empty of the kind of people I was looking for. I concluded it just wasn’t the right source for what I wanted, and stopped trying.

So Mastodon isn’t an isolated failure; it’s the same pattern showing up a third time, on a different platform, for the same underlying reasons. Instagram, Twitter, and Mastodon are different in plenty of ways, but the interaction mechanics (likes, boosts, upvotes, some fast way to approve or disapprove of a post) all simulate the same experience of human connection and approval. In my experience, that’s enough to produce the same effect regardless of which platform it’s wrapped in.

(Half-seriously: maybe in ten thousand years human brains will have adapted to handle this kind of stimulation without the same cost. I don’t actually believe that’s a realistic scenario, or a good trade if it were, but it’s a way of saying how deep I think the mismatch currently runs.)

I keep coming back to a simple comparison: it’s like an alcoholic keeping beer in the fridge. Moderation might work for a while, but if the substance (or in this case, the mechanism) is sitting there and available, sooner or later it gets used the way it’s designed to be used. In my experience, complete absence works far better than moderation for anything that can turn into this kind of pattern. I don’t think that’s black-and-white thinking so much as an honest read of how these things actually go.

I’m currently reading Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport, and it’s clarified something I’d been circling for a while: I don’t need social media to meet the drives it claims to serve. For real human connection, I’m better off investing in people I already know and meeting people in person. For my more specific technical and intellectual interests, dedicated spaces (Matrix and IRC communities, focused Discord servers) do a much better job than a general-purpose feed ever could.

So here’s where I’ve landed. I don’t have anything specific against Mastodon. What I’m rejecting is broader: any platform built around passive, infinite-scroll consumption, or around reinforcement mechanisms like likes, boosts, or comment counts. I think that category of product is fundamentally at odds with how human attention and reward systems work, and I don’t think our brains (which haven’t changed much in thousands of years) are built to withstand it in moderation. I’d rather put that energy into writing complete, long-form pieces on my blog than into scrolling through information I never went looking for in the first place.

I understand why social media is popular, and I understand the business logic behind the attention economy that built it. I just don’t think it’s compatible with actually living the way I want to live.

This isn’t the first time I’ve reached that conclusion, though. I stopped using Twitter about three years ago, but at the time I didn’t have the broader understanding I have now: I simply hadn’t found what I’d been looking for there. That understanding, that social media as a whole is a category I don’t want any part of, built up gradually after that. About two years ago I stopped using social media entirely, and by then I’d clearly identified it as a category of harmful things to avoid. Since then, I’ve occasionally made an exception and experimented with a platform when I thought I might learn something from it or make genuinely good use of it. Mastodon was one of those experiments: I thought maybe it was different, free of the pitfalls the rest of social media has. It wasn’t.

So this isn’t me deciding to quit social media for the first time. I quit a long time ago. Mastodon was just the latest, and hopefully the last, in a series of experiments to see if there was an exception worth making.