Social media sucks. Most people agree - it's overstimulating, overwhelming, and emotionally draining. For-you-pages don't quite feel like they're for you - they're for the creator to profit off of your agitation and engagement. But I think that a lot of people are faced with a dilemma of not knowing how else to spend their time. It's easy, right? You just open Twitter - sorry, sorry, X - and scroll until you get tired or too bothered to continue, or have something better to do. Put on a YouTube video to mindlessly play in the background.
After all, the easiest way is what you know. It's hard to find something new to spend your time on when you don't even know what's out there. It's a problem I do run into surprisingly frequently, in a different way - the issue of not knowing how to phrase a question when you don't even know the vocabulary to use. How do you navigate a place you've never been?
Some people might try something like searching "Discord alternatives" or "Twitter X alternatives" but this is a bandaid solution to a web-wide problem. It's not just about the platforms we're using - it's about how they're made to be used, and how we use them. No matter where you go, nine times out of ten, a website is built on a need to drive your engagement to drive profit. Webspace costs money - and users produce it.
We need a change of pace. We need to dial back the engagement numbers and take back our own engagement time. The best solution I have to the question of How do I navigate a place I've never been? is to find someone who has been there, and try to set aside your fear of seeming like a fool. At one point, none of us knew what we were doing, or where we were going. We asked the same questions, too.
Slow down. Do some reading - do some research. Look around the websites that you find, and show an interest in the person who created it. Open up inspect element and take a look around their code - look through their links, and follow a trail leading out. Some people - most, I think - offer some array of outlinks in a deliberate hope that you'll go down a rabbit hole instead of hanging your head and going back to social media. You don't need to be a drone of consumption. You are a person, and the internet was made as a tool for communication.
E-mail a webmaster. Sign up for a forum. Make a Neocities or a Nekoweb account, or gun for your own hosting through something like NearlyFreeSpeech. Carve your own niche, and go exploring in the woods of the web to find others doing the same. Slow down and let yourself wait for a response, sign up to an RSS feed, and enjoy the things people have put love and passion into.