Preparing to shut down my xTwitter feed
I'm just a few days away, now. I've noticed that the closer the next POTUS Administration gets, the more MAGA the Ads in my xTwitter feed become (I'm using MAGA as a catch-all for the American Right). Not at all sure I'll shift over the Bluesky. I've started subscribing to print publications again. I used to really, really enjoy xTwitter. It's the thing that actually facilitated a years-long shore leave from the Ship. Anyway, I think I've reached my end with xTwitter. You?
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Meanwhile, I deactivated my facebook account a week or so ago.
Came the day, and I held myself to that. Never looked back.
I've never bothered with Twitter, Facebook, or any other *social media* platform.
I hear that TikTok is still relatively sane - is that true?
I got a Mastodon account when I deleted Twitter, but there's not enough there.
There seem to be a great many Starmer-bashing channels, which I ignore, but the adverts I receive are mostly charity appeals, and films about how firewood logs come from small sawmills in Latvia...
I tried Mastadon, but the server I joined massively expanded very quickly - and then couldn’t keep up with the moderation needs. So the person running it decided stuff this, and shut it down. I struggled to find a sensible app I liked for it as well and so I think it’s got to be a year or so since I used it.
For me Facebook is about mild interaction with friends / family and the ability to FaceTime. Without it, if you don’t live near folk, your lose any sense of their everyday lives and that makes it difficult to maintain the relationship. Most of life is made of the small stuff - I may not have a burning need to know where you went on holiday or what film you watched, if I do it is possible to chat as in, oh did you have a good time in Spain, do you think I should see Wicked would I enjoy it ? It’s not so much the content as in the fact you demonstrate that you have held others in mind.
Sure, but to me Facebook is more about keeping tabs on people instead of being in touch with them. It's awareness, which is definitely good, but it's not the same kind of connection we older people grew up with through phone calls, and when families were more localized, occasional in-person visits.
Remember all of the early discussions about how email couldn't/didn't communicate "tone" well enough to replace face-to-face or phone conversations? It still doesn't, but I think we've adapted how we type to each other -- texting, too.
I should have added in the OP that admittedly, I know I'm late to the whole dropping xTwitter dynamic. And I don't mean to virtue-signal here, because I'm disappointed about it -- less so than I was when Musk first bought it, but more resigned to leaving now.
Thanks. I wasn't sure!
I wouldn't like to be without Facebook and Whats App though; although FB sometimes drives me nuts (like when you just keep getting posts from the same sources over and over - not to mention getting more adverts than actual posts!), but it is useful for keeping in touch with friends.
I have never used my work Twitter account, despite being encouraged to open it for networking. I don’t use my LinkedIn account either. I used to use my Facebook account for planning re-enactment stuff but I’ve not done that since the pandemic. My family still try unsuccessfully to use it to communicate with me though.
The only mailing lists that active these days tend to be highly technical or very niche, the blogosphere is a shadow of its former self, forums have been shuttered, very few newsgroups are in any kind of healthy state, etc.
There are still circles of some academic and other communities on X, some have moved partly to bluesky (which, well, stand up Mr Dorsey). Mastodon is almost the worst of everything for those who aren't power users. Most traffic still goes to the same 5/6/7 sites.
There are, or at least there are rules that require adult content to be labelled as such and settings to blur or block those images.
I needed twitter for work for quite a while so while I moved personally to Mastodon and then Bluesky after Musk showed up, I had to keep a presence for work on Twitter until Bluesky suddenly hit such a tipping point that I could ditch the Musk site altogether.
I stay on Mastodon but it's so hard to find other people that it's really very low key for me. However the starter packs on Blue-sky make finding interesting people to follow really easy and the blocking is so far superb. It made a huge difference - conversation about interesting things with interesting people all over the world suddenly became possible again without harassment and there's lots of interaction.
Dorsey quit the Bluesky board in May, not that I think it won't, to use the technical term by Cory Doctorow, eventually 'enshittify' but I take that as read. The head of trust and safety really isn't great but we've all had to pack our bags and move on before and no doubt will again, so it's great at the moment and worth being on till it goes down the plughole like the others.
Tiktok is unbearable for me because of the constant noise.
I go on YouTube for occasional specialist stuff but find their algorithms way too dodgy to feel at home there and anyway I greatly prefer text to video, so am loving Bluesky.
I didn't know about the TikTok noise that @Louise mentions - is it some sort of constant background music that can't be silenced? My ignorance of these Engines Of Satan is immense...
I do now use WhatsApp as a means of communicating with my immediate family (brother, sister-in-law, niece, nephew, and sister), and this is about as complex a wossname as I can manage.
You need to work horder at Mastodon. For anyone interested - I am redacted.
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Dafyd Hell Host
I keep my personal Twitter account because there are Good Omens fans and archaeologists and similar stuff that I follow - but it's the only social media where I get into arguments.
Facebook is very important locally for community events, and keeping in touch with friends.
I like tumblr a lot - there are a lot of Good Omens fans there (which at the moment is split between waiting for the main actors to dye their hair to get into character and serious discussion of the Neil Gaiman allegations)
And to have somewhere to go if Twitter does crash in flames, I recently joined BlueSky, which is full of interesting people and a lot of fun. I have been a lot more liberal with the block button from the very start, though - no busty young ladies, no-one asking for money, and no Far Right in my feed.
A local history group I am keen on helping insists on having its group there but I wont be party to that or provide content which could encourage people to stay on Facebook.
I forgot to mention that I also use YouTube for viewing services from Other Places, and have several favourites (one in Scotland, two in the Netherlands, three in Sweden, and one in Finland!).
Agree - in my small village Facebook is the forum where everything is arranged and got done. I’m not sure, absent a complete local sea change of opinion, how we’d go about changing from it.
Facebook can indeed be very good and useful - as with anything else created by humans, though, it can be employed for evil purposes.
I was fairly early on Bluesky but for a long time my professional networks just wouldn't budge from Twitter.
What budged them was a combination of Musk getting in the news for various nasty reasons and I think folk connecting that with their experience constantly getting worse and worse - eg. posts reaching few people, timeline getting constantly switched to their 'For you' algorithmic feed (which was getting increasingly full of the toxic blueticks and hate mongers), the often ignorant and nasty blueticks getting hoisted to the top of replies to posts, the sheer amount of hate and misinformation, blocking getting tampered with, moderation completely failing...
Even with a catalogue of Musky mismanagement people didn't want to shift.
Having a user-friendly place to jump to didn't work at once because people were very understandably worried about losing important networks
Then at the time Musk really stepped in it over the riots and Trump, lots of people started to move and some brilliant tools were put in place to make it easy to find your people again and suddenly people were getting better engagement and a much better experience on Bluesky.
A key thing is that the Twitter and Threads algorithms choke posts that include links - but bluesky doesn't so it's a great place for sharing interesting news and information and research and you can do that without the levels of harassment that you can get on Twitter. ( It's got a really useful anti- dog pile function where if a big account quotes and reposts you for their followers to dunk on, you can detach your post from the quote and block.)
I think bad effects of Zuckerberg's decisions would have to become a lot more directly visible to ordinary users and there would have to be a good alternative with easy tools for finding people again for a mass migration of current users to take place from Facebook.
I totally get that it's still close to irreplaceable in some places
I don't mind it feeding me loads of art and paintings: about 1 in a thousand of the ads are of interest (French soap), though if I check online reviews of attractive clothes, shoes etc it invariably turns out they are borderline scams based in China.
I've had a look at Bluesky, and it would be my choice if FB becomes too zucked up.
A family member uses Facebook all the time and it drives me nuts. The last few times I visited it I found I was annoyed by a number of things including the way said family member was conducting themselves. I'm much better off not seeing it. I'm fortunate that I don't have to engage with it for any work-type purposes.
I confess to being something of a YouTube fan, however, and I gather from the thread that this counts as social media. It's got its own weird way of operating, I find. When you open the site it offers you various options of things and you only have to let your mouse hover over one of them for it to count as you watching it. Before I got wise to this I wondered why my feed was filling up with videos of farmers dealing with flystrike in sheep
🤣🤣🤣
It's a whole new world, isn't it?
(Anyone feeling upset because their post hasn't got a laugh from me can rest assured that it's only to avoid seagulling the thread)
You can edit your watch history in YouTube. I have it set up to delete all history more than three months old (the shortest interval in the settings) and when my feed seems off, I go in and manually delete everything more than a month old, then individually delete all the oddball things it thinks I watched that I didn't.
However, it is troubled by women allegedly hungry for my body. I get them on Facebook too. I suppose this is the downside to being a multi-millionaire international playboy. There is a useful block/mute function so that I can eliminate these distractions.
I get that all over the internet. Boy, are they barking up the wrong tree!
Technically, I get those sorts of guys too, but I'm confident that all of these are scammers, whether human or digital.
Meanwhile, I've also joined bluesky and, some may notice, I'm posting here more. It's growing on me. I feel like using bluesky takes more work than facebook, which is a good thing and a bad thing. It's harder to get lost in scrolling, but it's also harder to pick up on the things that seem really salient. Generally, it seems a lot less organized, which is part of the fun of it.
And I read something once that what makes bluesky different is that it lets the user create their own algorithm instead of forcing the user into a canned algorithm that's controlled by some mysterious corporation. It feels a bit like linux, and I've always kinda wanted to be the kind of guy who used linux, but never felt I had the commitment for it.
I've never tweeted. I had a myspace for a while, and I can remember livejournal from back in the day. Never got into those as much.