I’ve become more and more aware of the negative effects that social media and YouTube are having on my mental health lately and as you may have noticed I’m becoming less and less active on them. What has been good though is the introduction of Slack into my life. I’m in a few different slack rooms now, all of which contain most of the people I interact with on Twitter but with no manipulation by the companies that run them.

I’m finding that I’m much happier when I’m in Slack and in positive interactions than logging into Twitter and feeling bad after I’m done more than good. Don’t get me wrong, I do have good interactions on Twitter but they are outweighed by the way I feel after being on there.

I do have my own little slack room but I don’t want to add another place for people to check but if you’d be interested them let me know.

You know I struggle with social media, I got into Twitter pretty deep and needed to get out and regain some headspace. I’ve done a few steps to help this including unfollowing everyone and removing the apps from my iPhone.

What I’ve found is that the best way (for me) is to schedule in my social media time. I have a reminder to log into Twitter every two weeks and in that time I check my notifications and DM’s. I then spend this time to reply to any that I have.

I’ve found that this has started to help me be more creative in my writing as I’m not constantly plugged into others opinions. It’s also allowing me to take time to just be bored and have some quiet time.

After seeing missed conversations and threads on Tweetbot I decided to give the official Twitter app another go. Well, I lasted 48 hours and had to delete.

• I hated seeing more news
• I had an advert every 3 posts on my timeline, even disliking ads and muting accounts didn't help
• Muting is more fiddly
• Dark mode just isn't dark enough

Back to Tweetbot and some calm.

You’ve probably read by now that Twitter is introducing new API’s that result in third party apps (like my favourite Tweetbot) losing functionality and being charged to effectively keep their customer base using their apps.

This is another move that is slowly but surely meant to see the end of all third party apps and I for one will end up using Twitter less.

I can see that Twitter want to drive people to their own app where they can serve you ads and monitor you more effectively but they have to realise there is a core influential set of users that will stop using the service.

I have two main problems

• I hate the official Twitter app. It's serving ads, too much visual clutter and muting is less intuitive
• I stream my timeline. In Tweetbot I stream my timeline and pin them to the top of my screen so I can see tweets come in real-time. It's how I keep up with what's going on (that's important to me). I stopped reading mainstream news a long time ago and Twitter wants to show me as much as possible

We are a few months away before this comes into play so maybe Twitter will do something but I’m not holding my breath.

My favourite Twitter app Tweetbot has got a shiny new version for the MAC. This is just a short post to let everyone know it’s available but I’ll be digging into it over the next week and will write up my thoughts.