Why this one is stepping back from Fedi

A lot has been said about how social media apps are designed to drive compulsive engagement and be addictive and this one is not gonna repeat all that here, except to say that Fedi (at least, the parts inspired by twitter/tumblr style UX, with posts, likes, boosts etc working similarly) has the same issue. Chronological timelines don't solve this, neither does the lack of recommendation algorithms. It's still a setup that rewards frequent posting and leads to a bias towards posts that are "successful", conditioning a response to notification beep to drive engagement, etc. This one fell hard into this, and this was even more problematic during low periods mental health wise, when it would use fedi to vent - which didn't help anybody, least of all itself, to be reliant on "do the creatures in its phone think its plight is worth a sympathy like" for validating its experiences.

It's still a place full of lovely beings. It's still a place where it has met some of its best friends, had a lot of fun conversations, and discovered a lot about itself. But the structure of interaction is one that was designed from the start to cause problems.

This one is still not leaving Fedi. It's been a nice place to find friends, and everybody there is mostly lovely. But its account is going to be much, much lower volume, and its going to be taking a lot of steps to try and reduce the compulsive aspects of its engagement with the network. It invites those who want to stay in touch more frequently to DM it with signal details.