Well… good for you, i guess, but you need to scrape the scummy residue of these toxic platforms off the inner workings for this very site to show you’re walking it like you talk it.
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I’ve never had a Twitter or FaceBook account because of privacy and security concerns plus a hatred of vacuous conversation. My big stretch into social media consists of membership on several audio forums, 2 photographic forums, LinkedIn and boingboing. The rest of the interwebs garbage out there can suck eggs.
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Eh, I only log in to Twitter to enter contests and for the likes of artists like @AndrewNadeau0 (MehGyver), @StrongBadActual, and @ASmallFiction . There’s nothing at all in particular I’d like to tweet at anyone, especially if some alternative is available. I would have no idea anyone like Alex Jones was there if it weren’t for people reporting on it.
But it has most definitely become abundantly clear that anyone with anything of any significance to say should not restrict themselves to a medium where any 140 characters can easily be removed from all context.
Facebook, on the other hand, temporarily sustains the illusion that my life is something other than a lonely existential wasteland. It has a niche.
I’m creating a social network of one. It will be on a powered off server, locked in a closet if anyone wants to follow me.
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I’ve found Twitter to be the most reliable way to contact customer service at lots of companies.
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#deletefacefuckingbook
#deletetwitter
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if an English rock band hadn’t asked me for my Twitter handle a week after my brother died, I’d have deactivated and let them have it.
You didn’t stick around Mastodon long Mark. I’m greatly enjoying my strengthened and lengthened friendships on two instances, and I’m improving my Japanese! (You and I and a Filipino named Lionel conversed in Japanese, it was the highlight of my first day on Mastodon.)
I learned that one can give Twitter handles to twitrss.me in return for URLs one can give a RSS feed, thus one doesn’t have to log onto Twitter, give Twitter income and trackers your browsing behaviour, encounter the trolls, bots and highly strung and angry True Believers, to keep up.
Ja mata!
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Yup, come on guys. Kill those trackers. It’ll take 5 minutes.
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I’ve never Facebooked, but I was an active Twitter user for a long time. I thought if I could keep near to my circle of friends (and slowly gain more) I’d be good. Of course there will be random trolls, I thought to myself, they’re impossible to prevent, and I could use tools at my disposal to block them as they appear. I used it that way for years.
Then someone mentioned Mastodon. I signed up on a server in that network, and it was amazing the change. Not just at a technical level, though being guaranteed I’d see posts in chronological order, only of accounts I follow, and every post they make was nice. But also, the positivity and genuineness in the people I met, and culture surrounding things.
The community I’m part of is very LGBTQ+ and furry friendly, there’s sizeable other communities out there in the fediverse as well. Not every instance is a good fit for every person; each has their own rules for what they want and their own mods to enforce those rules. You can even belong to multiple servers, the same way one might have multiple Twitter accounts for discussing different topics. The service as a whole may not be a good fit for some either, and that’s totally okay.
If you’re not yet sick of hearing about Mastodon every time someone talks about social media, here’s some helpful community links:
Mastodon is better than Twitter, elevator pitch https://www.codesections.com/blog/mastodon-elevator-pitch/
Intro to Mastodon https://medium.com/@GinnyMcQueen/toot-how-to-intro-to-mastodon-e5655bfa87d2
Okay, you’ve signed up, now what? What you can actually do and how https://kevq.uk/how-does-mastodon-work/
A more detailed guide https://github.com/joyeusenoelle/GuideToMastodon/
A list of instances that intersect with my chosen politics/interests, nowhere near exhaustive https://instances.noct.zone/
(Though if you’re going to join, please join in earnest; we’re a real community, and it kind of stings when people intentionally ignore that community and use the service as a glorified non-interactive RSS feed of social media elsewhere. Like Cory Doctorow https://mamot.fr/@doctorow )
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I’m also a fan of these things! What community is this? Might give me a reason to finally hop on mastodon.
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Specifically to your question, and less general: I use ‘community’ in a loose general sense rather than a technical one, of friends I’ve made on the service, and friends-of-friends, not confined to a particular instance.
I myself am on meow.social, https://meow.social/@Mycroft
The instance list at https://instances.noct.zone/ categorizes many into queer-friendly and furry-adjacent servers, though I’m not sure when Dzuk last updated it.
Awoo.space is a more limited instance that takes a more hands-on whitelist approach to federating to shield its users from potential abuse. While it’s not something I have need of, their whitelist doubles as a double-tested trusted source of good instances; you can see it halfway down the page at https://awoo.space/about/more
You’re not stuck with the first one you sign up on, either. Poke around, you’ve got time to find one that works best for you.
(If you get on, @ me saying you saw me here, and if you post you’re looking for a starter pack of queer furries to follow I can boost it for visibility)
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Cool. nice knowing you.
I haven’t talked to the other Boing Boing people about my decision to participate in #deactiday. This is something I want to do with @frauenfelder. Taking the share buttons off Boing Boing would be forcing a decision on you about whether or not you want to use Twitter and Facebook.
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Whether or not to use?
Maybe I am misunderstanding, so would you like to elaborate?
As far as I see it, everyone can still use FB and Twitter if BB would get rid of the share and tweet one-click links below all posts. It’s slightly less convenient. Even closing BB’s presences on those companies services wouldn’t force anyone besides yourselves not to use those.
I will kill my twitter - I effective didn’t use it since Nov. 9 2016, and am currently just squatting the handle. I am, however, also thinking about quitting the BBS as well. Leaving twitter was good, but I miss it sometimes for it’s speed and some clever tweeps, especially in the biology twitter bubble. I’d surely miss some personas of the BBS as well.
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Twitter has different roots than you might suspect; it evolved out of TXTMob, which was used by activists for communicating and coordinating during protests and actions. It was later used to plan mass lootings, something I think would still work (with appropriate anonymity tools), and I’d like to see more often. Then the idea was recuperated in the form of the spectacularized flash mob, and after that monetized with Twitter.
If you want to use the buttons, they are there.
That was the easiest activism ever. I literally didn’t have to do a thing. And hey, I’m 4 days early even!
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I’d compare them to the study carrels at one of the libraries when I was in college. I remember being so dumbfounded by what a fellow human being had written about other human beings* that I got to a point where I had very little faith in humanity and became quite nihilistic, sending me into this phase for a while. In hindsight I might’ve reasoned that it was from one random asshole, and dozens of other people had sat there without offending anyone. But, there I went…
I didn’t (usually) see this kind of invective from my friends on Facebook, so much as it would crop up from friends of friends, on my friends’ timelines. News article comments (Washington Post, Yahoo! News etc.), though, are quite simply pits of simmering diarrhea.
*It’s not like I’d just fallen off the potato wagon turnip truck, I guess it was the last straw or something. To this day I don’t remember exactly what I read but it was something about our female opponents in the First Gulf War.
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Oh shit
I just rejoined social media after years of fighting it.
Yes it’s a trap
But if you retain your love you can augment the false reality being foist upon us
Or I move to a cabin in the woods
But I would need wifi to order goods
Hello. My name is Arduenn.
I have been Twitter-free for almost 3 years now. I haven’t been tempted to go back since I deleted my account and I would like to share with you that it can be done and that it’s actually not as hard as quitting taking heroin intravenously.
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