Getting off META et al and how to do it

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?

But what did people do before Instagram and Tik Tok?

The sad thing is, in terms of cultural promotion (music, performance, etc.), it was the alt-weekly that every non-driver would read on their commute to and from work. Or in their bathroom.

I feel like the next step is no longer trying to reach the world (culturally) or communicate with the entire world (through social media), but being more content with the communities we're in, physically and digitally.

Re: what people did before, I'd be lying if I said that the jump from blogging to posting on facebook didn't result in far more people reading me - you just get this instant audience of friends, they don't even have to click away from the site, but even if you're just linking to your work elsewhere it's useful to get the word out. Progressively less so as audiences leave ofc, but as curmudgeon pointed out there's huge swathes of niches that are ignorant of #discourse and just calmly posting as they always do.

I don't know what the solution is and certainly major props to anyone trying to get something off the ground w/o meta.

re events, I went from finding out about events via last.fm until they destroyed that in about 2016, since then Facebook was the best way to find about them, but I would agree that that's been moving more to Instagram over the last few years. there's a lot that don't appear on FB now

Bring back sex worker ads and alt weeklies will be solvent again.

As terrible as Reddit is (and I don’t just mean ownership/politics, the upvote/downvote system and being actively hostile to ongoing discussion by design) at least it is occupied by real people and has the capacity to host a sub forum for every city and every micro-scene in every city.

Re: what people did before, I'd be lying if I said that the jump from blogging to posting on facebook didn't result in far more people reading me

Honest question, because self-promotion (not in a bad way!) is not a necessary part of my life, but what does the "more people" metric ultimately mean? Does that mean measurably more people *actually* buying/attending/watching/reading, which results in more income or whatever, or just "more," as in the potential for more buying/attending/watching/reading, etc.? Does losing part of your follower base result in actual loss of engagement/income/whatever, or just potential loss?

For example, I've seen people wringing their hands over leaving twitter and leaving behind their follower numbers, but what does that actually portend? What does, say, leaving behind 25K followers mean, practically speaking? Strictly a smaller audience and therefore less engagement and potential income/"success"? What does more people reading translate to, in real terms? Because the reason I prompted discussion of "before" is that before social media, concerts still sold out, products and stuff were sold, events happened: screenings, exhibitions, readings. Is that all just because hard listings existed, in papers and weeklies and whatnot, and that's how you got the word out if you had something to promote?

Again, being somewhat rhetorical, because that's certainly how I learned about shows and stuff, from newspapers and the like. But then, that's just a space to hang your flyer, so to speak. If any of you that use social media for promotion just shifted to, say, an emailed (or physical!) newsletter, would that demonstrably cost you warm bodies/income?

Thankfuklly I do not rely on creative endeavours for money so can't comment on that aspect of it. It meant people commenting on my posts (usually on facebook even if they're commenting on stuff from elsewhere but hey, they read it) and ppl finding out about my stuff that otherwise wouldn't have. Blogging by comparison was mostly shouting into the void, you have to tell ppl about it one by one and 99% of ppl won't read it anyway.

It seems self evident to me that the audience of a newsletter would be way smaller, it requires the initiative to sign up for it and then the initiative to open every e-mail, FB you just have to click on one link.

Strictly a smaller audience and therefore less engagement and potential income/"success"? What does more people reading translate to, in real terms?

What are "real terms"? My objective is for people to read or listen to my stuff, those are already the real terms. Not that I'd ever aim for or want 25k readers, the difference between social media and newsletter is more like the difference between having 20 readers and having two.

I feel like the next step is no longer trying to reach the world (culturally) or communicate with the entire world (through social media), but being more content with the communities we're in, physically and digitally.

I don't think that toothpaste can be put back in the tube. Idk I guess it could be enforced on us if all the options get so bad that younger and more media savvy people back away from them in huge waves, but people will find something else. Sometimes the communities we're in are the problem.

in orbit makes a good point. Social media (like the internet generally)
serves different purposes for different people. Some folks are glad that it reconnected them to Aunt Martha; others glad that they could finally get away from Aunt Martha. Her couch smelled weird anyways.

It's an elephant with poky bits and ropy bits

I think the elephant is very much like something that sat on our society and crushed everything that came before it.

What are "real terms"? My objective is for people to read or listen to my stuff, those are already the real terms.

What I mean by "real terms" is actual real world expectations from results, like money or sales. Obviously if someone was being *compensated* based on views/sales/listens, etc., then the number of people engaged is important. But if the goal is simply to get people to read or listen without expectation of compensation, as, say, an amateur or hobbyist (not saying you are!), then it doesn't really matter if it's one person or a million, right? So specifically if you're talking about a newsletter potentially costing you 18 out of 20 readers, that's not *actually* costing you or losing anything but ego, right? Unless you *need* rather than want those readers to do something more than read (ie buy or listen to what you're writing about). For example, I would love for people to watch the Brian Eno livestream I'm going to dip in and out of today, but if they don't, that doesn't affect me at all. But it does affect the filmmaker.

The social aspect of social media is self evident. That is, if I want to stay on Facebook strictly to share with my Aunt Martha what I thought of the new Jamie Foxx movie on Netflix, that's pretty casual, a conversation (like ILX). But if I want to promote my new movie with Jamie Foxx, that means getting that information to a large audience that will in turn spend money (or time as money) on my product.

We have a signal group here for underground shows … but it’s maxed out at a certain # of people.

I spent about 20 years organizing and promoting shows, and I am glad I don’t have to navigate this mess in that capacity anymore.

However, I now have work that involves advocacy and community outreach on at times complex issues… and idk … I never did twitter, it’s too much of a time suck … fbook was actually decent for some discussion… insta required making everything a meme, which was great if the content lent itself too that … but last fall I would get annoyed every week when other orgs doing outreach for the same mission made misleading/inaccurate memes or missed crucial points they could have made, and it was awkward.

Hardcore - Yabbut for lots of people "what came before it" sucked.

We didn't spring from a communitarian utopia to the present mess.

I remember lots of atomization and alienation and loneliness pre-Internet. It wasn't Mayberry. In the 1970s I traveled between my mom's house and my dad's house in an airplane.

And the initial reaction of some people to usenet or BBSes or heck, even aol was "yay! Finally a community!"

By the time I actually had internet, I had physically moved somewhere to have a community… idk … maybe I just need to make better memes

Definitely. It's possible that the internet saved my life; it definitely changed it in incredibly positive ways.

We still use a private fb group for one of my community aid projects, that's where the people are. We also use emails and Google voice texts but Goog doesn't WANT you to use any of their services for mass communication so emails and texts are limited, not very useful for our database of 1400 users.

In orbit … you should look into mail merge add-ons for google …

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.