Getting off META et al and how to do it

My fb isn't a fucked up hellscape? It's sometimes annoying but it's not the end times. Idk what yall are seeing.

My Facebook feed is mostly 'Old Minnesota' and 'I Remember Chicago' and similar pages I've never belonged to. When those started appearing last year, I assumed it was Meta's way of tamping down political posting (and nothing has changed with that algorithm in the past two weeks). And hey, the old photos are fun to see.

Here's what I see if I look at it on my not locked down phone right now:

Post from 2 days ago
Reel of "Kurt giving zero f*cks"
Post from 3 hours ago
Ad for A24
Post from 2 hours ago
Post from 2 days ago
Promo ad for some concert in Evanston
Post from a day ago
Post from 4 days ago
Ad for guitar shop
Reels of what may be a stand-up comedian

And so on. Maybe not a hellscape, but for sure pretty random shit in no particular order, stuff I follow, stuff I don't, ads, Reels ...

I always nuke/mark ‘not interested’ those topics and groups that I find déclassé, whatever social channel I’m on. It does improve my timeline. So does selecting the ‘friends’ timeline at least once a week. This is just good digital housekeeping, which is something we should all try to be attentive to.

I am also ok with what I am seeing from fb. (Not okay with billionaires being shitty, important distinction.)

My friends and relatives, stuff adjacent to my interests. I see content about Prairie architecture and Modernist poetry and local history and charming little wooden boats.

I don't see anything conservative unless it is being shown as negative. The ads are mostly for things that I dig, like mandolins and art supplies and food. AI slop is avoidable and easy to scroll past.

I hear all the criticisms but I guess I am just touching a different part of the elephant.

I don't see anything conservative, but I sometimes see ads in the sidebar of youtube for Trump shot glasses with a bullet embedded in them. I reported it for being "too sexy."

lol

My fb isn't a fucked up hellscape? It's sometimes annoying but it's not the end times.

same

i probably spend about 10 minutes total on FB and insta combined. i just check them for messages mostly. if i post something it only takes a second or two. i only use a computer so i don't get ads on instagram and the sponsored pages on FB is mostly just for underwear and pizza. also, i STILL get things for Mazzy Star and Hope Sandoval EVERY DAY on my FB despite the fact that i have never liked or read or looked at any Mazzy-related content on there ever. i will probably keep them both since they have become really easy for me to ignore.

(10 minutes a day i should have said...)

FB isn't a (political) hellscape for me, it's just shit. Friends started exiting circa 2014 and it snowballed, now the only reasons to look at it at all are a couple of useful groups but they're rarely worth bothering.

Instagram has been in the not bad category IMO, despite the attempted enshittification + showing me less and less from people I actually know it was still largely things I was interested in. I use it a lot to bookmark artists and bands as an alternative to keeping a tab open on my phone - follow them meaning to explore deeper but never actually get around to it. Instead I just get a nice drip of that content. Then yesterday it kept feeding me some kind of 'interact with AI avatars' chatbot shit and I think we're rapidly approaching critical mass on it becoming worthless.

Youtube requires regular sanitization - click one standup comic or video game video, immediately delete from history or else that's all of the recommendations (or worse, straight to Roganverse anti-woke comics)

FBPurity makes my feed pretty benign, but since leaving my WFH cocoon and moving to the service industry I've acquired some conservative "friends" through work. I'm still trying to figure out how to grab them by the collar and shake them effectively. Today I posted a pic of something I made for work and added "PS, DJT is a f@scist and Elon is a n@zi" and the post got disappeared before it ever made it to my feed. Half expecting to get banned in the next day or so.

IG has been getting noticeably worse, I hit a wall with that just in the last couple of weeks. I think capable users of media all post to their stories and not to the main feed. All the people I know under like, 40, use stories only.

not sure why people are debating the quality of their feeds when the original post said "Overall I like using Facebook ... But man, I'm just done with this fuckery. I don't want to contribute to the pockets of multi-millionaire bigots any more."

i don't have any specific advice about replacements but as someone who quit FB (a long time ago) and twitter (a couple of years ago), i know it seems daunting to make the decision but within a couple of days of quitting them you will not miss them at all, i promise. i'm not being pious here, i'm still on instagram, which somehow feels more pernicious because it doesn't come across as evil as FB or twitter. but fully quitting (not just "i don't use my account anymore" but totally deleting your account) is a good thing to do.

ie the point is not to quit because your feed is worse but because you don't want to be involved in this shit at all

I’ve seen people mention Pixelfed as an IG alternative, it seems like a combo of original IG and contemporary Flickr but similar to Bluesky as the existing platforms get too bad to use I’d rather just stop than start new accounts.

as the existing platforms get too bad to use I’d rather just stop than start new accounts.

yep I'm feeling this

My FB has a lot of bollocks on it, but the good stuff, the stuff I see from friends and Ilxors and others, is generally very good. Feels like it gets more and more clogged with rubbish every week though

No, I get the point of the thread, NA, we're spit balling here.

Never really got the hang of Instagram. I only use it for promotional reasons. I find it finnicky how you can't share other people's stuff unless it's a story, and everything else is these tiny thumbnail photos. Plus I get loads of ads and reels and other rubbish anyway. It's basically a less-user friendly version of Facebook to me

what these guys are counting on and maybe they're right is the addiction to being connected to people you probably would have naturally lost touch with or remained out of touch with forever, plus the supposed necessity of being online so you can keep up with news and networking. am i only going to miss the umpteenth reel related to a topic i clicked on a couple times several years ago? apparently. they also are probably counting on people juking their feed to fit their needs only to slowly boil it back to uselessness over time, repeat, reboil.

i have a pretty dormant vinyl record instagram which used to get a ton of likes on every post and it just declined over time. i probably needed to post photos of my wife holding the records instead or something.

But yes, this isn't to complain about the stare of various sm platforms as NA says. It's how to responsibly maintain an online life without supporting these fuckos ruining the world

https://www.punchinguppress.com/post/disengage-from-the-internet

IG has been getting noticeably worse

'So & So is now on Threads - don't you want to be on Threads? Don't you? Create a Thread account so you can follow So & So...'

Messaged a friend about this earlier today, after ILX's R.C. posted about leaving, a day after someone else I know hinted at the same. as the existing platforms get too bad to use I’d rather just stop than start new accounts--same, basically, I just don't have the interest in starting from scratch on Bluesky (which my friend said is different anyway, more like Twitter, which I never had any use for) or anywhere else. I'd be happy to go back to email as a form of communication (or Messenger), and confine all my brilliant insights and witticisms about art and baseball and life to ILX. But I am worried--or at least concerned--that I'd lose contact with some people. When I was living in Toronto instead of two hours away, this wasn't so much an issue.

I have noticed progressively weirder reels being displayed in my FB feed in the past few months. It might have started when i disabled off-site tracking? I can't remember. Whatever it is, it's probably working because they are a lot harder to ignore now and it makes me feel like a chump for falling into the trap.

FB has become less and less useful over the past decade, as friends have slowly left the platform one by one and event invitations have become infrequent. Most of the time I just share YouTube links of music, which I know the FB algorithm doesn't like, but I don't really care about whether or not I show up in people's feeds.

I do like keeping up with the people who are still on there. I'm not really on any other social media besides Instagram which is basically the same thing. I'll probably stay on it for the time being though it is very tempting to request that all my personal data be scrubbed.

Never really got the hang of Instagram. I only use it for promotional reasons

This is what I saw a lot of people say about Tik Tok, that it's great for promotion. But what did people do before Instagram and Tik Tok? That's a somewhat rhetorical question, because I'm old, and remember the before social media times, and ... I don't feel like much has changed. Except it's a lot easier to spend more money, faster? Which is guess means promotion is better?

But, for example, one of my kids loves to bake, and gets a lot of recipes from Tik Tok. That's for sure a form of promotion at work. But before that there were food blogs, and websites, and ... cookbooks. Which I read about in newspapers and magazines, and so on. The medium has changed and become less gate-kept, more accessible and cheaper (essentially free), but it's also become so coarse and dumb and racist and insane that it's really hard to balance the benefits with the drawbacks. Or at least, if you find a way to get rid of the drawbacks, then you might as well go back to the way things were before, because most of social media is drawbacks, imo, just stuff taking up time and space. Or as they call it, "content."

It might have started when i disabled off-site tracking?

No evidence of this but I'm convinced the non-stop push of the absolute worst video content in Internet history and including posts from groups and people I do not and have never followed was some kind of punishment from Facebook for opting out of tracking.

including posts on the main feed*

It feels less like punishment and more like the algorithm trying to target the lizard brain since it lacks info

I left Twitter quite a while ago, because Musk. I’ve moved all of my business purchases off of Amazon in the wake of the WaPo event. While Zuck has also been awful forever, the latest open/gleeful displays of support for fascism have made me feel some urgency about pulling the plug there too.

Like many other posters, though, FB and Insta are nearly the only audiences I have for promoting my band / upcoming shows / releases / new additions to my record shop. I wonder how much value any of it *really* has, but there’s certainly some engagement and I don’t know how I’d get any similar amount without having to make the time to do so by cutting out some other activity (sleeping? eating?)

Blurgh, no answers, only questions.

Yeah I do wonder if people even come to my club nights because of Insta stories and FB event invites, but I'd feel like I wasn't doing anything were it not for those

bandcamp? soundcloud? surely there must be other avenues?

I started doing (irregular) monthly listening parties at our house, and my invite list is all via text.

Hmm not sure how you promote events on those platforms. I'm surprised people say the best way to promote events is Insta. I always liked the Events pages in FB - they appear in your calendar so you don't forget them and work like listings pages

now's the time for MySpace to make a comeback!

Mad to think that 14 years ago there was an acclaimed film with Jesse Eisenburg about the making if this shithole website

Amen, MySpace had it all

I'd like you all to join my geocities webring

Is there a visit counter?

Sign my guestbook!

Come back Angelfire, all is forgiven. This site is part of a webring

Netscape,Tripod, GeoCities, Angelfire
Where have you been? What do you desire?

Every time I hear praise for MySpace, ironic or not, I just think "Oh yeah, right, the site that Rupert Murdoch bought."

Makeoutclub can remain in the deep dark past.

Billionaires really need to stop buying out websites

I just think "Oh yeah, right, the site that Rupert Murdoch bought."

I thought it was Justin Timberlake

relationship status: it's complicated
looking for: random play

My fb feed is 90% junk, it's the Platonic ideal of enshitification. No doubt there are things I could do to improve it, but they don't make it easy and I can't be bothered, so I rarely look at it. In bluesky they managed to make a copy of twitter (largely) without the enshitifying bullshit, why has no one tried to do this with facebook?

Wall Street Banks Prepare to Sell Billions of Dollars of X Loans
The banks are hoping to sell the debt at around 90 to 95 cents on the dollar. Owner Elon Musk has told staff the platform is “barely breaking even.”

Sell... to whom?

I've been reluctant to give up FB, for one it's still a good way to keep track of people I actually do care about, I honestly do enjoy for example seeing the updates from my cousin's bakery in Akron. I've always thought well, it's fine if you curate your feed, right? nah. their algorithm is showing me shit I don't wanna see constantly. not at all what it was like a few years ago. and the niche groups I'm in have been getting invaded by AI bots. like I'm in groups with names like "Krautrock Fantasy" where people just post pictures of their Cosmic Jokers LPs and it's now getting invaded by bots saying KLAUS SCHULZE HAS DIED! TANGERINE DREAM DEAD AT 67! THE ROCK WORLD IS MOURNING THE LOSS! Surely Krautrock Fantasy is a sacred space!!!

only reason for mine existing is because my spouse posts pics of our kids there THAT SHE DOESN'T SHARE ON THE FAMILY ALBUM and it's beyond maddening.

Whew

I never really thought I’d delete my FB account, but it’s done.

Deleted mine in 2020. Didn't delete Instagram but removed the app from my phone and will log in via web to check my inbox a few times a year.

Yes, you will take a hit to your reach and connections. But it will encourage those who you truly value to keep in touch more directly and intimately.

I've been using Signal for nearly a decade now and that is much harder to get people to use, especially those on iPhones. Would love to see more people move from WhatsApp and iMessages to it, but those on Apple platforms aren't incentivized to do so at all and Signal lags behind WhatsApp in features. It really needs to decouple from having a phone # to use it. I can have an iMessages account without a phone number but not Signal? Oy.

My friends and I switched to Signal last week.

a friend was suspended from FB for posting something about people donating to nonprofits and contacting congress regarding all the recent bullshit.

maybe Christopher Walken can teach us a thing or two:

“I don’t have technology. I only have a satellite dish on my house. So I’ve seen ‘Severance’ on DVDs that they’re good enough to send me,” Walken said. “I don’t have a cell phone. I’ve never emailed or, what do you call it, Twittered.”

I thought Signal was an op and the kids are on Telegram? I have both, I think as long as Signal mgs are set to disappear it's relatively safe?

Signal is open source E2E and you can actually build the app yourself with the source. No message data is stored unencrypted outside of the sender and recipient's screens when read. It's about as secure as a messenger can get. Never used Telegram but my understanding is it's a bit shadier (started in Russia, currently based in Dubai) and has non-encrypted chats set by default and profits off of user data as a for profit entity.

As long as you don't have a zero day exploit on your phone (which can see everything your eyes see, thus getting around any encryption), even if you don't delete messages, they're safely encrypted on your devices with modern encryption algorithms. Short of something like quantum computing or encryption breaking algorithms the public and academia aren't aware of, your data is safe. There's a reason most politicians worldwide, including those in the Trump admin, use it.

The org is also a non-profit, which takes donations for its revenue, similar to Wikipedia.

The consistent updating and device pairing stuff makes Signal kinda annoying, but I definitely prefer it to fb messaging. I’ve been using it for work stuff for about 7 years now. One of the developers is a friend of a friend.

I love Signal, the people i message with there are the ones i really trust

https://networkcultures.org/geert/2025/01/30/join-global-switch-day-on-february-1st-2025/

today is Global Switch Day, which mostly seems to exist as a hashtag on mastodon, but the above summarises the alternatives.

Just saw elsewhere: two other places described as "sandwich pile and azure atmosphere."

I admit the first one took me a bit.

sandwich pile and azure atmosphere

i.e. the cologne in my cabinet

i tried to sign up for pixelfed.art, didn't hear back. now when i try again it says the email address is in use.

i found a 're-send confirmation email' link. i clicked it, got an email, clicked the link which opened a page, clicked the 'confirm email' link on the page, got redirected to a help screen.

pixelfed and associated projects (there's a video version and a whatsap clone called 'sup) is all one guy

yikes. six years old! written in php :(

Is Pixelfed to Instagram what Bluesky is to Twitter?

Or do I have to pick a server and all of that mess.

yes you do - https://pixelfed.org/servers

I'm not getting involved in anything that makes me pick a server because that's automatically going to limit the amount of people participating.

While looking into that, I read that Bluesky has an Instagram alternative called Flashes that is supposed to come out soon. If it doesn't totally suck, that will be when I ditch Facebook/Instagram.

Hard agree, unfortunately. I know it's sort of driven by an opposing impulse but it's strangely similar to one of the supposed benefits of capitalism, choice. Choice of laundry detergent! Choice of smartphone provider! Choice of healthcare insurance! I don't want choice, I just want something that works.

I remember trying to post something to Instagram once and it was such a pain in the ass. I'm not great with computers and it was probably my fault that it was so difficult, but I seem to remember having to figure out how to resize a photo in a different app and that's when I gave up.

I took IG off my phone, and check once a week via the web app for messages. Other than that, I don’t look at it at all, and I am infinitely more happy and grounded.

pixelfed registration came through finally. I can't say I'm at all immune from IG clickbait but I do mostly use it for posting drawings/paintings and keeping in touch with like minded people, most of whom I know IRL, so I don't think pixelfed can replace that.

ig is just broken on web browsers. shokingly bad.