Tech, life and everything else
Social media is in a worrying state. TikTok in the hands of autocratic China, X (formerly Twitter) in the hands of Elon Musk, who gets crazier every day and hangs out too much with Donald Trump (and recommends a fascist party in Germany), and now Mark Zuckerberg with Meta (Facebook, Instagram, Threads) is also joining the group of friends around Trump and removing fact checks in the name of “free speech”. What could possibly go wrong?
reddit going dark (a protest action by many subreddit moderators over some planned API changes) reminds me that I should probably stop scrolling through Reddit so much. Reddit is a social network, and as such it attracts you with new content almost every time you visit. Which can be addictive. I once had a profile that I deleted because I wanted to leave all social media. But I fell into the same trap again.
Twitter has bought a newsletter platform called Revue. Revue’s business model was provisions of paid newsletters and premium features. After the acquisition, the provision has now been lowered and the premium features made free.
Sometimes I find it quite interesting to read through articles that I wrote three or four years ago, back then still on the platform Medium. Some time ago I deleted them on Medium and published them on my blog in a “Medium Archive”.
Today I finally deleted my Instagram account, or rather initiated a deletion for 30 days. Yesterday evening I started a data export, today I was able to download a ZIP file with all my data from Instagram, including all photos, likes, comments and stuff like that. So if I think of something important, I can still pull the data from the archive.
Facebook has written a response to the movie “The Social Dilemma” where they try to explain what is wrong with the movie. It is a little bit amusing to read through the document.
I watched “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix today. I like the movie! A good movie with a lot of things people from within my bubble probably already know. And a lot of reasons to stay away from (classic) social media.
I just noticed the following: Search on Twitter for IndieWeb and ActivityPub or take a look at the Google Trends for ActivityPub.
Yesterday, I wrote it’s time to stop using Facebook, and I wrote about how I’m still using Instagram and WhatsApp.
I deleted my Facebook account back in 2017. If you still have an Facebook account, maybe think again if you really need it. There’s this site and Kev Quirk also wrote a list of reasons why using Facebook might be a bad idea.