doomscrolling, internet grazing and the like
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note: this is a very personal view of mental health and addiction. 

i'm not a mental health professional nor should this post be considered advice. 

please seek professional help rather than self treat.

now that the legal arse covering is complete, let's get on the post.

i've been trying to change my social media usage habits, and one of the things that's been helping is using text based tools like newsboat and offpunk. i've written about my workflow in another posts[1].

switching from using the reddit site to rss has helped curbed my endless grazing a lot.

one of the things i learnt (through talking to my counsellor) is that the switching from reddit's algorithmic "home" feed to specific rss feeds requires intentionality. reddit's home feed will keep pushing hot posts to subreddits you're not even joined to.

another observation i made (again with my counsellor) was that i'm visually orientated. because of my current workflow[1] to view images associated with a reddit post requires an extra step, i originally wanted to fix this, but now i deem it a feature rather a bug. 

what this means is that a post has to be really interesting to get me to do the extra step. on those rare occassion where i want to participate (vote or comment) i also have a macro that will open the link in a graphical browser. i'm looking to replace this with w3m or elinks (these are the two javascript enabled text based browsers) which should mitigate from me accidentally begin grazing.

somehing else i observed is that some of the communities are  purely entertainment, if you're a member of any of the ok-buddy sub-reddits you'll know they're generally a community sharing specific in-jokes to that sub-reddit. so now that i don't have the immediate gratification of getting the "joke" because of an obscure post title along with the image, these subreddits don't have as bigger draw as they used to.

i'm still trying to find better solutions for instagram, but maybe the solution is have more intentionality rather than looking for entertainment i.e. download teaching videos.

i don't have all the answers yet, but i'm finding the general low volume of the "smolnet" (gopher, gemini, twtxt, etc) and having a goal rather than looking for something to entertain me are  helping make my interactions more meaningful.

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tags: socialmedia, doomscrolling, addiction, textmode
[1] gopher://gopher.club:70/0/users/tftp/phlogs/2026-05-11-001.txt

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