a nice thing about Cohost is that it hasn't convinced everyone that their role on Earth is to be the Some Schmuck News Network, offering up-to-the-minute updates and opinions on every matter of global import
"Your silence on the matter speaks volumes" culture when the volumes consist mostly of a description of how I'm actually not a political reporter but a nurse in Fucklesburg, Massachusetts and therefore mostly
qualified to commentate on the Fuckle Valley regional healthcare system
this honestly has been the biggest healthiest mindset change for me when it comes to social media an why cohost has been so much better. there are things i am equipped to write about but for everything else i am simply not the best person for it and it's not actually that important that I perform "caring" as much as possible through relaying every random post I see minute by minute on current events lest people think I don't care, which would be the worst thing really, people thinking an incorrect thing about me due to a lack of information or insight into my inner world. That's what's really important about this war or natural disaster, that everyone needs to know that I'm one of the good ones who cares about it. And everyone else who isn't acting like this is clearly some uneducated or uncaring sheep.
there was a stretch of time where the way i used it was unhealthy. like, i was bugfuck paranoid that people were thinking i was some sort of callous monster or something because i didn't reblog every single tragedy that came up on my dash, big or small, and i saw others who DID. hence why i switched over to masto, hence why i'm active here, hence why seeing people post like that on Bluesky during my daily social media maintenance checkup on there just makes me depressed
I bailed on my out-of-character Twitter (and Holly's IC Twitter became my main) because all my wonderful progressive/leftist friends were retweeting every horror of the world at me, at all times, and I just had to leave. It was too much. Some of those people, I didn't keep in touch with anywhere else, so I don't know what's going on with them... some of them probably think I'm dead.
I used to be of the "oh god I need to spread this news" persuasion myself in my younger years, admittedly. The big thing that got me to stop was ultimately just... realizing I wasn't actually doing anything remotely useful by 'spreading awareness'. Performative care is just that, performative - pure posturing for the sake of making yourself look better - but at the end of the day what retweeting news got me was... at best preaching to the choir, at worst putting a bunch of extra stress on friends who likely already knew on some level what was going on, who are universally in zero position to make any sort of meaningful change to the thing in question (and conversely, if they were, they would've done so without me pushing them).
There's just no point to it. Unless it really is something that hasn't come to light at all otherwise and the people you're reaching can actually help, or you're in a position where you can offer valuable input on the matter, why bother posting about it if it does nothing good?
