It wasn't because of Elon.
After reading some articles[^1][^2] I decided that it was time to reclaim my time and force myself to take some distance from social networks that are not extremely important to me. I removed Facebook years ago from my phone, and it wasn't a big deal. Why not evict some others?
Some applications like Whatsapp are important for me as they are often my main connection with my loved ones, my family, and my friends. However, some others, like LinkedIn, an employment-focused social network, should not take any of my personal time or space on my phone. I had my doubts about Instagram, but I'm too hooked to it, and although several recently published studies[^3][^4][^5] show that it could potentially affect mental health, in my case, it gives me the opportunity to talk to and stay connected with people who are not my closest friends.
I removed Twitter from my phone because it is one of the social networks where I spend more time reading what others have written rather than writing anything meaningful myself. Most of the time, when I retweet something, I feel like I'm just contributing to the overall social tension and political polarisation that seems to be well established in our societies now, and it even appears that it's not just me, that it's a widespread effect [^6]. Compared to other apps, Twitter also became a lonely place in which no meaningful connection has been created in years, at least in my case.
Instead, having a blog gives me the opportunity to think about what I'm going to write, do some research on it, add some context, and even learn new things while gathering information to write it. And one important thing about this is that I'm not a Pulitzer Prize winner. I'm not being paid for writing a blog. This is my space, I own this. This doesn't need to be perfect, as Kev Kirk explains in #100daystooffload[^7]. I just need to write when I feel up to it.
Hosting is not a problem. Right now, there are plenty of options for hosting a blog. From nice and minimalistic SaaS solutions like Bear to serverless platforms like Github Pages, Cloudflare Pages or Vercel, passing through PaaS services like fly.io or Oracle Cloud. Most of these options are free or have extremely generous free tiers that are enough for personal blogs.
In my case, for obvious reasons, I'm using Cloudflare Pages. The fact that Github now allows you to modify files from the browser makes things super easy for me because that means that once the integration between Github and Cloudflare Pages is done I can just edit or create pages in Github and my blog will be automatically compiled and updated in Cloudflare.
References
[^1]: My awakening moment about how smartphones fragment our attention span
[^2]: What to blog about
[^3]: Status of Mind report
[^4]: Instagram Is Doing Grave Harm to Our Generation. We Need Help to Stop It
[^5]: Facebook’s internal research on the mental health effects of Instagram
[^7]: 100 Days To Offload: Can you publish 100 posts on your blog in a year?
#opinion