Probably stop using platforms/sites that exist to make money off you. I know it sounds ridiculous, but... the vast majority of the crappiness on the web is due to greed for money. If platforms didn't care about making money through ad revenue they woudln't be manipulative attention-harvesting outrage-bait.
You can actually engage in the trash platforms by using unofficial methods - I browse "youtube" by searching on Invidious and then either viewing on there, or when it doesn't work, download with yt-dlp. Or if someone links an "x" post I view it with xcancel (if at all). I don't care how inconvenient it is. For social media, fediverse (mastodon). Every other platform is for-profit and it shows in its respective design. I contact friends and family through texts and email. I've gone so far that I literally block all Meta-owned domains on my Pi-hole. I'm hoping to upgrade that to blocking Google domains but I'm not there yet.
I generally try to opt out of the psychologically-manipulative world that hyper-capitalistic greed tries so hard to force on me. It's kind of impossible to do completely, and social connectivity is made a LOT more frictional/tedious, but.. I try to "walk the walk".
Oh yeah, I still use IRC and XMPP. Hotline and KDX occasionally too.
You can actually engage in the trash platforms by using unofficial methods - I browse "youtube" by searching on Invidious and then either viewing on there, or when it doesn't work, download with yt-dlp. Or if someone links an "x" post I view it with xcancel (if at all). I don't care how inconvenient it is. For social media, fediverse (mastodon). Every other platform is for-profit and it shows in its respective design. I contact friends and family through texts and email. I've gone so far that I literally block all Meta-owned domains on my Pi-hole. I'm hoping to upgrade that to blocking Google domains but I'm not there yet.
I generally try to opt out of the psychologically-manipulative world that hyper-capitalistic greed tries so hard to force on me. It's kind of impossible to do completely, and social connectivity is made a LOT more frictional/tedious, but.. I try to "walk the walk".
Oh yeah, I still use IRC and XMPP. Hotline and KDX occasionally too.