Social Media Deathwatch II

Not content with seeing Elmo destroy Twitter, Reddit's management have one-upped them, and killed Apollo, the good mobile app (there was Alien Blue, but Reddit bought it and screwed it up; it's trash now).

Many subreddits were going to protest by going dark on June 12-14, some ongoing, but now while that's probably still happening, it's irrelevant.

When a site tells you they don't want you using it, except by their captured clients, you should stop using it. All they want is to control you and put ads in your eyeballs, until you explode.

That happened for me years ago with Twitter. It happened before that with MySpace; I know it sounds like a joke now, but if you liked music and web design, MySpace was a fantastic place to meet people. And before that, there was LiveJournal; now owned by Russian criminals. Reddit came out of Digg being fed into a woodchipper just because Kevin Rose wanted a little bit of money. I dunno what keeps a billion people trapped in Facebook, but they've never had open clients, those people like being property.

Don't use closed networks owned by someone else.

Use fediverse and IRC, and be prepared to jump servers if you don't like hosting your instances. There's a Reddit/Digg-like Lemmy built on ActivityPub, so you can subscribe to things from Mastodon, etc.; I've started reading that and will probably start posting to it some. There's dozens of fedi/mastodon/pixelfed clients; hopefully someone makes one as nice as Apollo for Lemmy.

Update: Lemmy.ml is overloaded, there's instructions on how to pick other instances and join groups. It's happening!

Antisocial Media

Even as people catch up with me and deletefacebook; and the ongoing dumpster–nay, all of New Jersey—on fire of Twitter; there are still quislings or dupes of the ad companies who think centralized "social media" was a good idea.

  • They want all their interactions mediated by one authority. Petty convenience beats security and self-determination.
  • They never understood RSS and didn't take the 15 minutes to read about it and get an RSS reader, preferring instead to spend that time looking at cat pictures and arguing about blue/gold dresses.
  • They don't want or understand having control of a domain and their own identity, so whoever squatted on @xxx first gets that name forever. Unless the platform owner steals it for someone more profitable.
  • They don't have/express opinions other than Party Orthodoxy, so have no reason to fear the Special Ban Police showing up in the night to take away their posts and social connections. And they haven't yet realized that the Party and Orthodoxy changes, but the police never do.
  • They want to make sure people they don't like, can't read the content they put in a public place to be indexed by Google, Facebook, and other ad companies. Unless the thought-criminal signs out or makes a bullshit account, circumventing their block.
  • Is this about you?