I don’t find myself making spontaneous buying decisions for frivolous nonsense in my life in general when I stick around here. All of my purchases are due to my needs and research only.

Physical disability with social isolation gives one a potential ability to more deterministically decipher where and how interactions influence them. I have less inputs and influences and tend to remember what was suggested or peripheral to my intentions. I got into a lot of stuff over the last 10 years that, when I look back, I really don’t know why I did them. I know my surface reasoning, but like, why was I following those people and spaces in the first place–that kind of meta logic perplexed me. When I quit YouTube and switched to newpipe/reddit, those random tangents were drastically reduced. When I quit reddit they went away entirely. It is entirely speculation, and probably borderline paranoia, but I probably only bought stuff on AliEx because it seemed like everyone on YT was buying from there. I can’t say it was all bad or unwanted or anything like that. I can say I got stuff I didn’t need or use.

I still explore new interests and projects I feel like trying when I see them here, but I have yet to feel influenced in a way that hints at manipulative intentions.

I’ve seen people try with disingenuous arguments that have 5-10 upvotes instantaneously. I’ve seen posts that have supporting corpo replies seconds after posting or where a typical type of comment for Lemmy gets a large scale negative response quickly that is obviously not genuine or typical behavior. Unlike reddit, these seem so blatantly obvious here that I block the posters and commenter immediately. Blocking here is rather effective and blocking a lot of users makes for a pretty pleasant experience unlike anything I ever had on reddit. This is my only outlets to contact other humans and I feel rather balanced with it and self care. That is more than I can say about reddit.