daisyblog

For the past few months I've been once again working on downsizing my Internet engagement, or at least changing it up. Between social media websites and apps, streaming services, news content, and practically everything else, all bombarding me with ads, stalking me across the internet, collecting selling every miserable piece of data they can squeeze out of us, creating a bizarre speculative economy where all that matters is how much traffic you can get on any particular page for the greatest amount of time, I just find myself being too distracted by everything I find offensive about how the modern internet is being done to have any fun or find it useful anymore. The hamster wheel of avoiding the permitted hate speech on big sites like F*cebook while tiptoeing around the traps that get my account limited for standing up against that hate speech, and pushing back against ads that appear in between almost every legitimate post, sometimes "hiding" dozens of ads in a row in my state of frustration. It's literally exhausting. It's not worth tolerating anymore.

Meta is possibly the worst, even next to Elon's Twitter. So, to keep up with the short race to the bottom, Meta launches another social media platform (bringing them to three separate platforms), Threads. I can't overstate how uninterested I am. I'm not amused by the ironic cynical engagement of people who go to Threads to make a post like "YAWN, another social media trend I'm for some reason obligated to check out, by one of the same three companies that keep farting out data mining hate speech platforms over and over, can't wait to see how long THIS ONE lasts *smug grin*." Why? What in the name of all that's holy is there to gain? ANOTHER fucking META PLATFORM. You've got to be kidding. And people are really eating it up like it's not going to be the exact same hot garbage that's been giving us all brain damage for the last 10 years.

Of course, like a lot of people, I have a lot tied up in social media. Obviously I have pages/art profiles on some of them, but beyond that, I've made amazing friends on Facebook, kept in touch with old friends, connected to some really great radical groups, other artists, local organizations, and important or interesting information. I've carefully curated a pretty uplifting and informed circle on Facebook and a strictly art- and aesthetics-related atmosphere on Instagram. Still, with the vast effort I've put into reducing the hateful and exploitative noise on these platforms, it's worthless against the endless resources Meta is able to pour into attempting to poison our social wells.

I don't want anyone to think I'm being hyperbolic here. Meta is one of the most evil organizations on the planet, and their platforms are uniquely responsible in some major ways for the hard trend in countries around the world towards fascism and violent bigotry and the general worsening of the Internet in general.

Here's amnesty international describing their report on how Meta's platform influenced what became an all-out genocide in Myanmar.

Here's Meta ignoring repeated pleas to take the way its algorithms seem to promote content that increases mental health issues and eating disorders in young users seriously for many years, leading to 1,200 families attempting to sue various social media companies.

Here's Meta collaborating with financial companies to collect financial data on people who are just filing their taxes.

Here's a piece about Threads being so brutally invasive in its data collection that it apparently isn't even planning to launch in the EU, where it doesn't even almost pass the GDPR sniff test.

Oh, and here's the bit about Facebook purchasing Instagram and Whatsapp as anticompetitive activity (duh), because for a while Facebook was VERY insecure about its status as Your Favorite Social Media, which allegedly was going to lead to an FTC lawsuit against them (which, considering Meta has not sold Instagram or Whatsapp, did not or has not yet panned out very well because holding Big Tech accountable for anything is not an option).

OH WAIT, then there was the time that Facebook eagerly handed over chat messages to Nebraska police so they could prosecute a teenager and her mom who bought abortion pills and induced a miscarriage.

And hopefully we haven't all forgotten Cambridge Analytics already. Yikes.

At some point, it all gets to be too much to justify. It's ridiculous. Cartoonishly evil. It's almost embarrassing to keep going back to it as many times as I have but as much as I hate to say it, I HAVE THE SOCIAL MEDIA <a href="https://daisyangst.com/gallery/art/brain-worms">BRAIN WORMS</a>, OK? I've been on Facebook since 2008, and on Instagram since years before it was bought (and ruined) by Meta. I'm addicted like most people are to some degree, because these sites are very precisely engineered to keep you on them. So I just have to keep trying to quit, over and over, and find a feasibly sustainable alternative to my digital social life with Meta's products. I've quit alcohol and tobacco, two very difficult things to quit, I will quit Meta. (Rather than a personal failing, it should probably be a bit chilling to consider that I'm admitting to finding it almost as hard to quit toxic social media sites as it was to quit two substances that are widely recognized as extremely addictive and difficult to give up.)

So I'm choosing Mastodon. Spooky and controversial I know. It's really not that technical, and it's got its issues for sure, but the plusses far outweigh the minuses at this point, especially when compared to the trash I've been putting up with for years. This isn't the place where I'm going to sell Mastodon to anyone, some people haven't gotten into it and that's just gonna have to be a bummer for me. But I can't continue letting myself be openly exploited by the big companies, at least not where I have any choice. It feels bad, man. And when you've experienced once again what the internet can be like when your visibility is NOT being throttled by the platform, and you experience the joy of having a simple and honest conversation with someone with similar interests which isn't being driven by the most inflammatory and outrageous comments that gain the most "likes" (the number of "favorites" or shares a post or comment gets is not even typically visible on Mastodon it's so far from being the focal point of the platform), and you're NOT walking through a minefield of automated content moderation with no meaningful human insight or accountability.

The Internet used to be a very different place. I'm often sad that it's not like that anymore, but it could be. But there has to be a meaningful divestment from the status quo. I haven't been able to reach the vast majority of my modest followings on Facebook or Instagram because Meta was VERY EXPLICIT several years ago about its plans to roll out exciting new features like *checks notes* throttling the absolute shit out of your reach among people who ALREADY FOLLOWED YOU, unless you pay to "boost" posts. I am not exaggerating, it was like night and day when they implemented it, my page with a little over 2,000 followers now is typically only capable of reading 30-50 people max, a few hundred for the occasional fluke. It has never been the same since then and I will not give and have never given money to Facebook so I can get around the fucking FAKE ASS BARRIERS they chose to place in front of my small audience I had already cultivated. It has been that way for nearly 10 years.

Now I guess they have other shit for pages too, where they let pages "monetize" their content by how much engagement they can generate. But I've already seen the shitty ways this has affected small or niche pages, and especially marginalized people. It's too exhausting to detail, but it's noticeable that the experience of both the page and the fans is worsened by prioritizing reach over the quality of the fanbase-creator relationship. And then they will be arbitrarily demonetized every so often, such as Trans Skater Boyfriend, who was recently demonetized for a "page name violation," because it turns out Facebook doesn't want to pay pages whose names directly reference "controversial social issues," and so by acknowledging that you're trans, you violate that requirement, because BEING TRANS is a controversial social issue LOL. The emotional toll this took on them was sad to see, and of course, there is no transparency or accountability, because it's all robots anyway, and one day they were allowed to monetize again, with no explanation there at all (with no change to the page name).

So the list of reasons not to use Meta products is pretty staggering. At some point, there won't be a choice about whether you want to use Threads or not: like every other Fun New Feature™, eventually you will be forced to assimilate. I don't plan on sticking around to see it. Going forward I won't be promoting Meta products such as by sharing my page links for those sites or directing traffic to them, either here or elsewhere (I know, that'll teach em alright LOL). I will be gradually withdrawing from those products until I can fully abandon my accounts and pages, making it so that I curate my content here and share from my website, and connect with people through the blog and with Mastodon.

My plans for Etsy and Patreon are less clear; they are still nominally useful as of yet, but like, I don't do exclusive content type stuff or special subscription packages, so if I'm honest Patreon was never a really good fit. I'm doing all of this myself. I'm a part time worker, I have various health issues and disabilities. ("I'm new in town...") If people like my content, they can and occasional even do buy my shit on Etsy, and if none of my products are what you want, you can ask me about it (see: my contact page), or just pledge me a buck or whatever on Patreon. But I just don't have the type of personality that lets me be a machine that can be prolifically creative, technologically savvy, AND aggressively and consistently market and promote my projects while having a day job and a healthy personal life. I've tried that life, it did not go well. (Sorry to all who were involved during those dark days LOL.)

For people who don't want to use Mastodon, I'm also looking into an RSS feed. All you need is an RSS aggregator app, which can be easily obtained for free. It's more technical on my end: easy for the blog portion as almost every blog software includes RSS functionality by default, but it might take longer to figure out how or if I can set up RSS for the gallery itself for folks who don't care about my weird blog, as I'm not using any CMS on that site (that's all me, babyee). But things are developing.

Thanks for reading, buddy, it is very late now, goodnight. (Gives the homies a little kiss on the forehead)