This is my first blog post in 2020, so first of all: Happy New Year! 🎇

The beginning of a new number on the calendar is a good time for some self-reflection. Among other things, I have thought about my relationship with social media again. Just as many others who spend a great deal of time on the Internet, it’s a sort of love-hate relationship. On the one hand, I enjoy the power of social media to connect people. On the other hand, it’s kind of addictive and can lead to mindless scrolling, which can be a huge timesink and makes you feel unhappy.

For Facebook, I’ve reenabled the Disable Facebook News Feed Firefox extension, which I used before but disabled at some point.

For Twitter, I’ve taken a little inspiration from Glitch CEO and blogger Anil Dash, who wrote about cleaning up his Twitter feed for the beginning of the new year. The post is from 2018, but he set off a tweet indicating he did the same thing this year.

I couldn’t convince myself to be as radical as Anil, so I used Tokimeki Unfollow instead. The application is inspired by Marie Kondo and works by showing you each of your followings with their latest tweets one by one and asks whether their latest tweets “still spark joy”. You can then choose to either unfollow or keep them. The process is also comparable to swiping through Tinder and similar apps.

I unfollowed inactive accounts, those whose tweet frequency is too high and those where I can’t remember why I started following them. I kept friends and people I’ve met in person or interacted with lately. It wasn’t a vast purge, but at least I got down from 492 to 302. My Twitter feed feels different and less overwhelming now.

For other networks, I haven’t made any changes.