

100% agree and its like you took the thoughts out of my brain. The people I know who watch short form videos a lot have no attention span or patience. I agree that lack of reading, and IMO streaming services like Netflix, also contribute to this.
I’m very happy/lucky that my city has a pretty good reading community and lots of indie bookstores. I’ve become a lot more vocal about reading and books when I talk to people offline, even though most don’t read. I just want to encourage others to read, a lot of the nerdy shirts I used to wear have turned into indie bookstore shirts so I can advertise. I talk about my local libraries, again I’m lucky to have 4 branches I can access: 1 county and 3 city circulations. I encourage people to use the library for printing (it’s cheaper than that big corpo store you use and the money stays in your community), borrow books or movies, use digital services, and different book sales and musical events.
If I can’t do much in the big picture, I’ll at least promote as much as I can to help people I have direct contact with.

My journey here took a while. I was on the standard Reddit app for a while, then they started promoting that “He Gets Us” bullshit ad. I blocked the account and it was gone for a while, then it showed up again. I had been dabbling with the Apollo app and I switched to that to avoid those stupid ads. Then the API stuff happened, I logged off and never logged back on again.
I went to Threads for a bit, which was nice because I had IRL friends there. Then Meta changed the community rules where calling trans folks mentally ill and bullying LGBTQ+ folks wasn’t considered inappropriate. So I logged off and didn’t log back on until I deleted my account in January 2024.
I joined Mastadon, which is nice, but it’s not easy for a newer, not quite techy user to figure things out. I figured it out, but I get why some folks find it confusing.
Then I joined BlueSky and hung out there for a bit. I still do because I like to follow specific reporters and organizations. But I soon realized, I don’t really like the short form formatting, so I joined Lemmy, then swapped to piefed recently.
Since then, I’ve been hanging out here for actual discussions and on BlueSky for breaking news and info.