Lately I've been making some changes in how I interact with social media, and also how I consume its news and blurps. I started using Mastodon and basically moved my interest there (I tend to double post to both Mastodon and Twitter, as Twitter is still where most of my followers are and the interaction happens between more people). I stopped reading my Twitter lists, as I found I mostly used them as news feeds, so I now use a real news feed for doing just that. Try it, RSS is still awesome :)
Another reason to soft-quit Twitter is its lackluster (or rather non-existing) reaction to the toxic part of its userbase, and alienating its users by just not listening, removing more and more useful features and developer possibilities (API's, token limits and more).
Combine that with some tidbits about Facebook lately:
It’s worse than you thought. Facebook gave:
- Microsoft names of users’ friends without consent
- Netflix and Spotify got to read users’ private messages
- Amazon got user contact info via friends
And:
So, as many suspected, Facebook combined data from wherever it could in order to suggest "people you may know"—also outing psychiatrist's patients to one another etc. What this reporting shows is that Facebook exchanged people's data (without informing them) to get that data.
Together with articles like this one in which is highlighted yet again how toxic the companies behind the big social networks are. Something similar is happening to Tumblr, as it is actively alienating its users. Mastodon is happy to welcome them into its instances.
In a bout of nostalgy I confessed that I long back to the days I updated my weblog regularly with thoughts, random tidbits, links, and photos. I plan on doing just that.
Fun thing is that apparently more people agree on this.
It breaks us free of the shackles of the social walled gardens, and we can still interact through commenting systems, chat, email (wut? Yes, why not), and we can follow each other through the trusty RSS syndication (I can recommend both Inoreader and Feedly).
Try it! I will be doing so for sure.
Oh by the way, I've been doing this exact thing for fifteen years now; congrats dammIT!
BTW, even Rands is asking “Why am I spending so much time consuming other people’s moments?” in The Builder's High, in which he talks about why building and making things is so much fun. A good read, and I'll be making more things for sure.
