Five years

July 6, 2022

Five years ago I was in a mental institution, undergoing treatment. It was an eight-week inpatient program for people with PTSD.

I was about half-way through it and was already starting to feel positive changes. I was on my laptop, trying to figure out how to get rid of the toxicity in my life.

Work was an obvious one. It had been a dream job for 12 years, but a year prior the company had “merged” with a bigger one located 350 kilometres away, and things had been going south since then. But I was on medical leave, so now was not the time to deal with it. I had plans, but they could wait.

One more immediate concern was social media and the stress it brought to my life. I was not an avid user but there is this push-pull relationship with Twitter and Facebook. You are force-fed posts according to algorithms that are designed to elicit “engagement” through strong emotions like admiration, envy, shock, outrage —mostly shock and outrage. So there is this urge to react to other people's posts, but also to share “interesting” things about your own life with the hope to get some feedback in return, either in the form of praise or dissent.

I had come to the conclusion that Facebook and Twitter were not safe spaces, and I deleted my accounts.

I never looked back.

But I had been on the internet for too long, and to be frank it is my main means of interacting with other humans. I am human, so even though I do not necessarily appreciate the company of my peers, I still have this urge to socialise in one form or another, because whether I like it or not I am part of a social species.

Looking for alternatives, I found Diaspora —which I actually already knew and tried once again— but I wasn't able to embrace it. Then I found Mastodon. I had heard of Friendi.ca before and this seemed somewhat close. I learned about the concept of instances and federation. I am familiar with systems like e-mail or jabber, so it was not too hard to wrap my head around them.

I signed up for a mainly French-speaking Mastodon instance called mamot.fr, after reading a few posts there to see if I could fit there. Mostly left-leaning open-source software enthusiasts, teachers, librarians, etc. It could have been framasoft.org —which seems to share a somewhat similar mindset— but I had to pick one, so mamot.fr it was.

I quickly discovered that contrary to Twitter or Facebook, the user has much more agency in the way their social graph (or bubble) is constructed, which may be a negative to some because it takes some time to build: you don't have a ready-made “suggested” timeline, and therefore it requires a conscious effort of selecting who you want to follow, through a process of discovery. But to me it proved to be a huge positive because it means that I can carefully choose who I interact with, and I discover new people mainly through those with whom my already established contacts communicate. It takes longer but the quality ends up being higher.

After a few months I decided that I wanted to take this a step further and set up my own self-hosted, single-user instance: this gives me full control of what other instances can talk to mine, without having to depend of an instance administrator (other than myself) or a moderation team.

It may sound like a huge mistake to cut yourself from other instances, but so far so good: I haven't blocked many instances, but I don't want to see racist or sex-trade related content. The racist/nazi stuff because these are ideologies I oppose but don't want to waste my time arguing against, and the sex-trade content is because I am simply not interested. It is not a moral judgment on sex workers, but some instances are clearly meant to serve as a promotion platform (i.e. spam). It could have been people trying to sell me VPN tunnels or foam mattresses, it just so happened that I had sex workers spamming my timeline.

Today I am still happily on Mastodon (or more broadly, the Fediverse), and intend to remain there for the foreseeable future. Exchanges seem to be more genuine and not exclusively geared towards boosting one's ego.

As for my professional life, I went back to work after my (successful) treatment, feeling better but also stronger, and in a much better head space. I tried to make things work with my employer but after a year it became evident that things could no longer work. I quit and went the self-employment route, partnering with a few ex-coworkers.

More than three years in, I earn about the same as when I was on salary (a little bit more actually), but I have so much more control over my time and my work decisions that my quality of life has tremendously improved in many ways. I am more efficient, I can go at my own pace, I have much less stress, I can take a break when I need one without having to justify myself, and I can spend a lot of time with my loved ones, taking care of things at home. I love my new lifestyle.

Looking back at the outcome of my life-changing treatment five years ago, I can say that I have regained control of my life and I am much happier today!