Nothing I’m going to say here is super unique. And I’m not trying to convince anyone of anything. But nevertheless I want to post this in case it resonates with anyone out there.
A long time ago I posted about Mastodon and how I didn’t want to use it. I changed my mind a bit later and gave it a try but quickly started to feel some bad feels. I kept at it but the other day I finally cleared out my profile and unfollowed everything and stopped using it (I may automate the account to cross post from Cohost but we'll see).
What I realized was that, even if I got over the FOMO (which I did by training myself to just skip to the latest if there were 100+ posts unread), Mastodon still felt like "social media". A stream of content to be consumed. I followed a bunch of people. I followed hashtags. I probably scrolled through hundreds of posts a day. And while some were meaningful to me the vast majority were just... something to distract me.
Then I looked at Cohost and how I use that. There's a typically small set of people I always read posts from. Whether or not they follow me doesn't matter, but the point is it feels more personal. It's not just about content. I legitimately want to know what those people are thinking/doing/working on. I log onto Cohost a lot only to find one or maybe no new posts and that's fine.
The other big thing, for me at least, is that I can still browse hash tags. And save them. But they're nicely tucked away so that I only engage with that feed when I want to. Usually it's to see if there's someone else out there that I want to follow. Or I might check in on trans posts to see if I can post a nice comment (I don't do this often enough admittedly).
While I never left Cohost it still feels in a way like I'm coming back to it. It's certainly the only "social media" type site I’m on and I'm glad. I've pruned my follower list a bit to remove people that I followed out of that Mastodon mentality of "get more content good". I might prune it some more.
Anyway I have no grand conclusion. I'm happy this site exists and for the people I interact with on it. 