Category: SocialMedia

my tiny corner on bluesky

whbeebe

I’ve written how I’ve abandoned all the major social media platforms. That doesn’t mean I’ve abandoned them all. I’m on Mastodon and Bluesky.

This post is about proof-of-life on Bluesky. I seldom visit, have very few followers, and follow even fewer than follow me. This capture shows that I was one of the earlier Bluesky members (first 10%!). The Bluesky platform is far more powerful than any other in that it has the tools in place to completely block anyone, for whatever reason, from injecting crap into your timeline, of comments into any of your threads. The blocked can observe, but not respond. When Twitter was my platform of choice, you could block another user, but that was only from you. That user could still respond to any of your existing threads, and the others in that conversation were still offended by that user’s presence. You get blocked on Bluesky, and you get blocked from doing anything.

I also like the fact that I’m no longer provoked into doom scrolling my timeline. Of the total lack of any ads. Or any of the other blemishes of the other major platforms. Bluesky is, for me, a social media paradise. I don’t know how long this will all last, but I intend to carefully enjoy it for as long as I can, for as long as Bluesky lasts in its current state.

meta-less

whbeebe1 Comment

Back on 22 August I finally scheduled my Meta/Facebook account to be deleted. Note that you have to schedule the deletion, and then wait 30 days for it to go into full effect. That’s so if you have a change of heart and decide, for whatever reason, that you don’t want to leave. All you have to cancel the deletion is log back into you account. I would have written about this back on the 22nd, but I wasn’t up writing about anything. I was coming out of the worst of COVID at the time. I had just enough presence of mind to find out how to delete my account.

That’s what I find most aggravating about Facebook (and that’s what I’ll continue to call it). I had to search externally via Google (meta delete account) before I found the correct set of instructions within Facebook. If you try and search within Meta/Facebook, you will be led on a wild goose chase and never delete your account. That constitutes a dark pattern of the worst kind.

This isn’t the first time I’ve deleted a Facebook account. This is, in fact, the fourth. I’ve been on Facebook starting in the early 2000s. I remember wasting tremendous time playing Farmville. I never spent any physical dollars, but in hindsight time is certainly money so I wasted quite a bit. In the end I dropped it because Zynga kept updating the game to make it ever more difficult to play without spending real money in-game. Changes would also wipe out progress I’d made up to that point. After that happened twice I just walked away.

That makes the last of the Really Big Social Media platforms I’ve dropped. I still have an Instagram account, but I’ve not been on it since sometime last year. I can’t stand to be on Instagram because of all the ads and accounts I don’t follow overwhelming my feed.

The only new social media accounts I’ve joined in the last twelve months have been Mastodon and Bluesky. I don’t spend any time on them anymore. The idea of wasting time on any social media platform has become anathema to me.