Personally, after dumping Facebook and Twitter, I made a Mastodon instance to chill out on. While it is arguably just as much of a time waster as any other soc

Personally, after dumping Facebook and Twitter, I made a Mastodon instance to chill out on. While it is arguably just as much of a time waster as any other social media, it doesn't track me, throw ads in my face, show me an algorithmic feed designed to manipulate me, "suggest" people and pages to follow, and since it's my instance I can choose what other instances I do or don't want to federate with. The end result is a form of social media that's much better for my mental health. We've all seen the studies by now about the stress and other negative effects of Facebook. None of that applies to Mastodon and the fediverse in general. Or at least, much less of it. Ultimately, of course, it depends on how you choose to use it. But yeah it's still just as easy to spend all day on there instead of actually getting shit done. Mostly. One thing Mastodon doesn't do, which Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, and the rest do is bug you with notifications telling you what you're "missing out on" if you don't use it for a while. I've had Instagram go nuts sending me constant notifications telling me nothing except "this list of people posted recently, check out what you're missing!" Then, when I disabled its notifications, instead I get emails saying the same thing. I'm probably gonna delete IG soon because it's Facebook owned and I don't use it anymore, but point is, these mainstream social networks are designed to pull you back in constantly. Federated networks are not. Much easier to not use Mastodon for a few days, nothing will bug me about it.