I agree that there’s always been toxicity on the Internet, but I also feel it’s harder to avoid toxicity today since the cost of giving up algorithmic social media is greater than the cost of giving up Usenet, chat rooms, and forums.

In particular, I feel it’s much harder to disengage with Facebook than it is to disengage with other forms of social media. Most of my friends and acquaintances are on Facebook. I have thought about leaving Facebook due to the toxic recommendations from its feed, but it will be much harder for me to keep up with life events from my friends and acquaintances, and it would also be harder for me to share my own life events.

With that said, the degradation of Facebook’s feed has encouraged me to think of a long-term solution: replacing Facebook with newsletters sent occasionally with life updates. I could use Flickr for sharing photos. If my friends like my newsletters, I could try to convince them to set up similar newsletters, especially if I made software that made setting up such newsletters easy.

No ads, no algorithmic feeds, just HTML-based email.