Why I'm Here [And why i hope to stay]

TL;DR at bottom
[i might end up posting a lot here, sorry in advance. I also swear a lot so if that is an issue for you,
A. i'm assuming you weren't my friend on facebook, or were hidden from the offensive posts proactively, because i've been like this a long while, and
B. I promise i'm only abrasive in my choice of words, really!]

I've felt gaslit by a lot of people over my life over many things, but one thing that never really settled for me was my aversion to moving to facebook, and then friends going "well we never woulda moved here if we knew it would go this bad". This pisses me off every time. I remember being vocal, probably more vocal than anyone else I knew, about how much i didn't want to move to Facebook. Of course, shortly after moving, i just accepted the mass migration [especially after MySpace updated its layout to "fit in with the modern crowd".]
i liked all the things it connected to. I liked that i could make a facebook page, post some shitty joke, and get a few hundred other idiots like me laughing at it. And it changed who i was for a time. Don't get me wrong, I am still kind of an asshole that will laugh at a joke at someone else's expense, but like a rich glutton's servant, hoping to induce cardiac arrest on their boss, it overfed me. It fed a part of me that I never want to feed like that again. I fed into an energy that went from people making snarky jokes about controversial events to people outright claiming that mass shootings never happened, calling dead children's surviving family members "crisis actors". Mind you, I never participated in that - I never went from jokes to outright disinformation, but people like me began that slide. People like me normalized talking about crazy things you'd never say to someone's face. I'm not trying to overstate my value; i was a squirt of piss in an entire water park that should be shut down for health violations. I never in my goddamn life thought it would get this bad, but i knew it would be a bad trade before we all moved.

like...I knew. 10th grade fuckboy that didn't know much about the world, but i damn well knew that we would regret the mass exodus to facebook. We would regret being able to see the inane things people would post all day, every day. We would regret being able to look into the void that is idle human thoughts the way we have over years.
I didn't know the extent of why - the fact that they would use their massive collaboration of data to exploit the thing in our heads that makes skinner boxes work, or the fact that they would curate newsfeeds to sap as much of your attention as possible - but i did know that the almost excel-sheet level uniformity that profiles exhibited would be bad news.
Being a kid, I thought at the time that it was just the layout I didn't like. Turns out, that doesn't matter for dick, because they change it every few months anyway, generally for the worse. At the time of this writing, the desktop facebook site runs like absolute trash after loading less than 20 posts.
You could almost say it was the stop of the constant drip of dopamine that the news feeds are designed to provide that helped wake me up, among other things.

all that aside, i'm realizing that what I liked about classic myspace over facebook was that, if you wanted to say something - if you wanted to get something out there and express how you felt about something - you had to goddamn do it. you had to type it out, go through the effort of drafting a post, READ THE WORDS THAT YOU ARE SAYING TO OTHERS, and post.
we have gotten so thoughtless with the evolution of social media. opinions are simplified to "i agree with this guy" and "I hate this guy". the pavlovian treatment of being given information you already like [or love to hate] in exchange for your continued interaction with that material just sets you up for hours upon hours of time lost to bickering with shitheads in comments sections.
That's not to say Myspace never had that, and that's not to say here won't have that. The difference is, you can't just press a button for your posts. You can't just go "uhuhuh yeah i loik that thing", hit share, and get dopamine from your friends liking/reacting.
you post. your friends with time that care read. you get it out of your system. 

additionally, while you were still advertised to [Edit: I assumed ads were here because i always have adblock on, but i turned it off after noticing a 0 count and I am mistaken, no ads. God bless you, devman; I believe Myspace still had ads but they were noninvasive. This is a step further and holy christ i love you folks] you were not treated as a product the same way you are on Facebook. You are not indexed by your physical attributes, or your political affiliations, or your recent tragedies, or anything. You were not targeted by mass media companies looking for people susceptible to believe bullshit, and then targeting them with frog-in-a-boiler-pot style posts, inching them closer and closer to crazy until they have isolated themselves from everyone that they love, and that loves them, rambling about stolen elections or being offended at minor grievances.

I want those days back. I want other people to want those days back. I want meaningful friendships and companionships that don't just boil down to a series of numbers telling me that x people found it funny, y people acknowledged it, z people "loved" it. Maybe someone angry reacted but never talked about it. They felt a reaction - an enumerated variable - was enough to convey a feeling that centuries of language was developed for people to put it into words.
this was a mistake in social media evolution, and I will be glad to return to monke.

i want my goddamn friends back. I want to do something with my spare time that isn't staring into a hell-rectangle waiting for the next big news break. And this is, god willing, my first step towards that.

TL;DR
Reject curated automatic newsfeeds. Return to monke.