Getting off META et al and how to do it

My name is Dog Latin and I'm a social media addict.

I've been using Facebook for many many years and I also have Instagram accounts for a couple of personal projects.

Facebook suits me, largely because in my part-time life as a club promoter, community moderator and DJ I can host Facebook discussion groups and create events to tell followers when there'll be shows and gigs.

It's also a good way to keep in touch with friends and family, of course, but that function is becoming increasingly difficult with the amount of spam and unwanted content.

Overall I like using Facebook - I like its functionality. And the 700-strong music community I host is one of the things I'm proud of.

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 want off. But I still need a place to host my music community and chat with my friends.

Never really been a Twitter guy, so Bluesky isn't for me. Not interested in that way of communicating. I enjoy narrowcasting to just the people I like and the people I want to engage with.

People have suggested starting a Reddit, or possibly starting a Discord. The latter seems fiddly and a faff, and I can see it becoming just a very small amount of people joining. I have similar reservations about Reddit, I dunno.

What can I do? How can I maintain these communities and relationships without burning everything down? In many ways I wish we could go back to the pre-social media days of ILX-style messageboards etc.

I'm not ready to leave FB yet, but my closest friends and I have moved our chat from WhatsApp to Signal.

it's a toughy, huh? i was thinking something like signal or whatever, but it's a tough sell when most of the people I know are still on Whatsapp.

I don’t use it. I only have it since I use it for clients of my businesses to get in touch.

It’s worthless as social media for me, everytime I open it there’s a plethora of ragebait, AI bullshit and gullible people with no criteria commenting.

Instagram is getting useless as well, there’s like two ads when scrolling instead of posts of people you actually follow.

I guess reddit is the social media I’m addicted to the most but I mostly lurk.

I’d probably also suggest trying to move the community to a subreddit. If they’re loyal followers they’ll follow the link even if they don’t create a profile.

Quite easy to start and manage a Discord server, nothing too technical about it. Getting people there and engaged is quite a bit trickier.

My Facebook account was killed a couple of years ago, and the page for CoS with thousands of followers who didn't see anything unless I paid Meta was lost too, but annoying but what can you do? I've made a discord but like I say it's hard to get people involved there until you reach a certain size. I hate the culture of Reddit but am considering starting a subreddit there anyway.

with a good deal of careful muting of words and people, bluesky is proving a good place to talk about music, though the last week has tested this to breaking point.

That said Reddit is now public and has always had some investors who are also billionare bigots.

There doesn’t seem to be a winning position with social media nowadays, if they’re big enough to get the exposure you want, there is very likely an evil group of people behind it and groups of people pushing an agenda and an army of bots.

I guess the best position is to use them knowing you’re being played and not engaging too much outside of your comfort zone.

It’s only getting worse. I miss the internet from 10+ years ago before it started being so openly weaponized.

The problem for me is that I use Facebook to keep up on music genres like DC Go-go, southern soul, and more . On Facebook those genres have a number of fans, followers, and academic scholars that I can’t find elsewhere. Instagram is also useful for keeping up with New Orleans brass bands, punk, dancehall and amapiano and Latin music and jazz musicians and Dj’s

i have a few things to add but bookmarking for now

One of you guys (I think?) recommended some Facebook extension that locks it down. No ads, things in chronological order, only who you follow, etc. I don't look at the site that often, but I won't have a real problem with it (on a micro level) until this extension is somehow nullified. I'm even less on Instagram, so don't really know what life is like there. I had a similar lock-down extension for Twitter, also recommended here iirc, but fuck Twitter.

I feel I keep cutting more and more from my digital consumption habits and sources across the board (though not this board). What websites, what social media, what streaming, and so on.

The whole events/promotion thing is tough, I sort of can't believe there hasn't been a decent replacement for facebook (and I haven't been on facebook for years now, but even before I quit I felt like event invites weren't working as well, for many reasons).

Honestly I suggest starting/building up an email list, it's not perfect and I know some people never see an email, but it feels better than the alternatives. I do that and IG these days (because I feel like it's required), but also I'm not very successful at promoting shows & records these days and try to avoid situations where I'm the one primarily responsible for doing so.

Instagram is basically my only 'social media' presence and I post pretty lightly... I know a bunch of people who are temporarily logging out in some kind of feeble protest but they''re not actually killing off their accounts, so I'm not sure how effective it'll be

If I were to kill my account, I think I might instinctively look for it on my phone for awhile but then I'd forget I ever had it (like facebook, which I haven't been on in like.. 15? years)

I think if ur considering leaving these places u shd just do it. If u have a community built up that you care about or works for ur music life or whatever maybe hand it off to someone who can run it for u?

insta is pretty much the only way i can promote my band/shows, so i ... can't leave???? though i guess when i deleted twitter i was like "how will i promote my writing???" and it turned out that twitter was absolutely dogshit for promoting anything so not much changed

I deleted the fb app a while ago because it’s completely dead and full of garbage, I log on occasionally in browser to see my building’s neighbourhood group, & the page of the book club I’m in, & to post my advent calendar + repost the same three or four stupid jokes to an audience of 3 ppl. In theory I also log on to see if there are any worthwhile updates from friends but frankly there aren’t.

So it’s p easy for me to quit, I’m gonna do the awful thing of announcing it first just on the off chance anyone I’m only connected with on there wants to keep in touch some other way, then I’m gonna have a quick scan to see if there’s anything (photos &c) I might wanna save

For practical reasons it’s probably not gonna be on the cards to move every WhatsApp chat I’m in to signal but at least I’ll be off the platform that is explicitly for far right disinfo & calling being lgbtq+ a mental illness. & I still have an apple phone & use Amazon services, what are you gonna do

btw, when I look at Facebook on any other place other than my locked down computer I see the fucked up hellscape that everyone else sees, stupid ads, obnoxious Reels bait, things out of order, often by several days or even weeks. It's like putting on the glasses in "They Live."

When I log in I always see that dogshit webcomic with the aliens or Sarah’s scribbles and tbh for that alone I need to leave and my quality of life will vastly improve

I deleted my Twitter account. I get the sense that it's important to completely remove your info and not just take the app off your stuff in order to take your data away from them for AI or whatever.

I'm not ready to let go of Facebook, Idk. My whole family is there. My feed has pics of people's kids and life updates from friends that I can't travel to see irl, including lots of ex-ilxors.

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?

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 …

Basically if you have yr database in a google sheet it’s super easy, and it’s cheaper than a lot of newsletter software services

i check my IG on desktop for messages once a week, but have removed it from my phone. i am reading and watching and writing more.

i only still have a facebook b/c i enjoy the ‘memories’ feature. otherwise it is dead to me.

honestly, while i will probably have to get back on the train if i end up having to promote a book sometime in the near future, at this point i am not going to use IG for anything. 2025 is my cleanse year, and i am feeling good about it.

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).

I think that's a very sad way of looking at the world, to be honest. Financial recompense is not the only thing that matters, and preferring to have 20 listeners rather than two is not just about "ego", the impulse to share things is not just about making yourself feel good (though obviously that's part of it). I would want the maximum amount of people who I think would be interested in whatever I do to know about it, and as I said since I tend to write about rather esoteric stuff and am not at this point interested in making this my regular grind that doesn't mean I want millions of readers. Sure this is partially about how it feels nice to have someone say "hey really enjoyed this" (which you might get every once in a while if you have 20 readers, zero if you have two, in my experience) but it's also about those extra readers/listeners having their own thoughts and reactions that will in possibly make my work better etc.

No, I totally get it. I feel the same way. I was just trying to be objective in the context of the thread. That is, if someone relies on social media to promote anything essential to their livelihood, putting food on the table for yourself or someone else, it would indeed be a pretty frustrating or frightening burden faced with the prospect of finding an alternative. Just saying - and this is similar to the twitted embeds discussions - that if one does have a moral or ethical objection to a social media platform and there's nothing really at stake by not using it, then it's pretty easy to not use it. I brought up the semi-hypothetical 25k followers on twitter example because there are/were, for example, artists I follow(ed) that relied on their audience to make a living (sales), there's something concrete at stake, and abandoning or switching to a platform would mean rebuilding that vital audience/base from the ground up. As opposed to someone that, say, posts cute cate videos. Unless they are making essential bank from those cat videos, maybe they are.

Cat videos def one of the most profitable grinds on the internet rn!

Yeah, that was a bad example, lol.

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

― sarahell, Friday, January 24, 2025 3:29 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Basically if you have yr database in a google sheet it’s super easy, and it’s cheaper than a lot of newsletter software services

― sarahell, Friday, January 24, 2025 3:31 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

I would like to subscribe to your newsletter but our database is now in Airtable because someone offered to build us a custom system!

We just gave up on sending out a newsletter which I think has been harmful to our work, but we don't have someone volunteering to report and write and design and publish a newsletter anyway so

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?

I had about 5000 followers on Twitter before I dumped it. (I made my account private and logged out; I have not deleted my account, because I don't want someone else taking my username.) I have about half that many on Bluesky, but the quality of conversation is much better. More people like my posts, I get replies that are worth reading, etc.

I use Bluesky to promote my newsletter (which has about 4200 subscribers, fewer than 100 of whom pay for it) and my record label. When I started the label, one of our first releases attracted some press attention, and I told a writer for the New York Times that since we only made 500 physical copies of it, it was up to me to find those 500 people. To date I have not been able to do that; I have hundreds of unsold copies of each of the 10 CDs we've put out since 2021, including that one. Now, I don't usually hire PR (I did once, and it achieved nothing), or buy advertising, so social media and the newsletter are the ways I let people know about new releases. And they don't seem to do much, honestly.

Ha, I was literally about post this!!!!!--> I guess I'd love to hear from someone like unperson, who iirc runs a record label and writes books (so concrete products to be promoted and sold) but also writes a newsletter (which is more personal), about the pros and cons of social media, what works, what doesn't, etc.

I guess my conclusion would be (and this is something I've seen, like, bestselling authors say) that social media is not good for sales but is very good for branding. It allows people to get a sense of you, and if they like that version of you, maybe they'll buy your stuff. But you might have to mention that you have stuff for sale 20 times before it sinks in with one person.

Many editors want people they’re interested in hiring or working with to have lots of followers, or a certain amount of verified followers, on Twitter or on Instagram. Just about the only arts/media people who can stay off social media already have enough cultural capital.

that first thing i wrote last year on Medium got the most views/reads and this is the rundown:

External referrals
93%

email, IM, and direct

918

facebook.com

660

twitter.com

531

ilxor.com

398

bsky.app

108

instagram.com

74

google.com

49

losslessbored.com

7

mail.google.com

4

getpocket.com

2

All other external referrals

7

My conclusion: Just pay Ned to put something on his Facebook and you will get eyeballs. Its better than paying Google!

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

― sarahell, Friday, January 24, 2025 3:29 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

Basically if you have yr database in a google sheet it’s super easy, and it’s cheaper than a lot of newsletter software services

― sarahell, Friday, January 24, 2025 3:31 PM (nineteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink_


I would like to subscribe to your newsletter but our database is now in Airtable because someone offered to build us a custom system!

Many editors want people they’re interested in hiring or working with to have lots of followers, or a certain amount of verified followers, on Twitter or on Instagram. Just about the only arts/media people who can stay off social media already have enough cultural capital.

but is there a direct demonstrable relationship between eyeballs and results, or only a presumption?

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.

this has not worked for me at all. it regularly re-serves me content i told it i'm not interested in. i still have this shit habit of checking in on FB a few times a day and most time the first things i see are garbage suggestions and clicking "not interested" or even blocking etc is getting too time consuming (on top of not working). anyways i ditched the app a while ago and just check it via browser, but really need to quit the habit of opening the fucking thing at all. can just email my mom pictures and vids of her grandkids and share my dumb thoughts on bluesky

xp No it's a good question. I would say...if you don't have a communication channel, assuming your project needs to be able to connect and share information with a wide range of people and not just a chosen few--if you don't have eyeballs, you can't have results. The former doesn't guarantee the latter however.

Thermo, you have to also keep selecting the Friends option to minimise all the infra digital groups but if you’ve got hunnis/wine moms in your friendship group you might see things like Aunty Acid memes, and if some of your male friends are also basic, you’ll see the dumb groups they have joined. If there are chuds in your friends list, you’ll see toxic nostalgia groups and tons of AI shite. Curate accordingly.

"toxic nostalgia groups"

lol I love this

totally nails the vibe

the key is to not despise your friends

Tends to be relatives who are basically huns/chuds in my case, but all the old ravers that’ve wormholed towards conspiracy psychosis are easily unfriended or snoozed; same goes for transphobes (more common than homophobes on my socials). Also, if you argue with anyone in those categories, the algorithm serves you right (wing).

Even when we are careful, they still serve us dumb shit. If you join groups (I’m in school/hometown/university groups, a big food group or two, some UK journalism and ‘scene’ groups, and a couple of whippet groups) you’ll also see the stupid affiliations chosen by members of said groups on your timeline. I hit not interested/irrelevant a few times each time I visit my profiles, and I think it does help in the long run.

thanks - i had no idea i had that option for my feed. still going to try to be on it less, but this will make things less awful for sure

Earlier this week I posted about leaving FB/IG later this year and going to Bluesky, and was heartened by how many people were in the same mindset, not just ILX cohort types but people from college and other friend groups. Everyone’s just DONE.

well i'll tell ya before i left the house this morning there were all these sirens and police and fire and a helicopter and i was like what the heck and it was only from facebook that i learned later that someone or someones had died in a sand pit. never would have known that quick without the facebook. did i need to know? maybe not. but i was curious.

well i'll tell ya before i left the house this morning there were all these sirens and police and fire and a helicopter and i was like what the heck and it was only from facebook that i learned later that someone or someones had died in a sand pit. never would have known that quick without the facebook. did i need to know? maybe not. but i was curious.

I am on bsky now and realized that the “import contacts” feature from fb was super useful for remembering people I want to keep up with

I’ll confess that I still like FB not for keeping in touch with IRL friends but for the random groups of strangers I’ve joined and love as either informational resources or pure diversions: crappy banjo players, nice photos of random spots in West Virginia, birding groups, country lanes of Great Britain, ultra running and gravel bike training groups etc. I don’t want to give these up! But I’d be much more productive.

OK, some thoughts on the dystopian Internet and how to manage one's interactions with it.

First: The idea of a universal public Internet open to everyone - I don't think that works. I don't think that has ever worked. I look back at how soc.motss was named that way because of anti-queer trolls, I look at what happened to alt.transgendered, i look at the way one of the first spammers was someone DARVO-ing the Armenian Genocide and the immense amount of time and effort it took to disconnect him from an open, decentralized network...

I also see Internet communication as a sort of floating crap game. This week it's Discord or Bsky or whatever, next week that's been taken over or shut down and it's something else. Twitter differs from Gab in that people had to _join_ Gab. They just have to _not leave_ Twitter. You see people talking about "bringing back Web 1.5" or something and God, we didn't ever leave it, did we? I left Facebook in 2017, cut out all public social media then (this message board contains my sole contributions to the public Internet since then), and I lost contact with most of my friend group when I did that. We'd been friends since the Usenet days, more than 20 years, and I've barely talked to any of them since. It is difficult to leave somewhere you've known... I mean God I was on Usenet until _2006_. I didn't even _post_ here until 2011, because I didn't want to get involved in those newfangled "message boards".

The thing I always liked about Usenet, what really was amazing about it, was that it brought together niche communities of weirdos. We're kind of a niche community of weirdos, if for no other reason than that we're using an Internet message board in 2025. If I have any use for the Internet in 2025, it's niche communities of weirdos.

So I guess that's the thing. If corporate social media has a use for you, what is that use? What is the cost of doing without? What are the benefits?

Because social media is designed to be addictive. The more one uses it, the more miserable one is, and the more one wants to use it. There is withdrawal. There is loss. I think knowing that is important. And I think finding other ways to get one's social needs met is important.

ugh, nextdoor

for better or worse, my small city has an active subreddit and I peek in there once a week. it's fine, just the same people asking about things like that or making the same running jokes

clicking "not interested" or even blocking etc is getting too time consuming (on top of not working).

Do any sites have a functional “not interested” button? YouTube and Instagram definitely no, Apple Music/Spotify no. I can’t tell that thumbs up or down on a streaming service has ever done anything.

Maybe Apple News is really good on this? Or is it the most universal form of enshittification.

huh? YT definitely has not interested options next to the suggestions it serves. Or do you mean you think it doesn’t work?

It doesn’t do anything. “Do not recommend channel” works for hiding the channel but it will even repopulate your recommendations with videos that you already hid as not interested.

https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/20/23356434/youtube-dislike-not-interested-buttons-bad-recommendations-mozilla-report

the Facebook Reels one doesn't work at all. I kept clicking See Less but they never go away. I just hid the whole section with FB Purity eventually

just had FB straight up delete a post of mine with no explanation, it was to this link:

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

I've also only seen two notifications, but there are over a dozen comments on the post itself

the fix is in, I mean it always was to a degree but just like everything else they are turning it up to 11

xp to CP aw yeah I love hiding Reels and IG links with FBP

that being said, this latest madness is prob enough for me to step away

i just shared this picture on Facebook. i believe in uplift culture.

https://scontent-bos5-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-6/474626537_122133814070494369_5668551629370239008_n.jpg?_nc_cat=111&ccb=1-7&_nc_sid=127cfc&_nc_ohc=epHran8CR4cQ7kNvgFKk27j&_nc_zt=23&_nc_ht=scontent-bos5-1.xx&_nc_gid=ANvjtYGvAkA7VznWmufvDhj&oh=00_AYCQCAgcN40i0njE38PcxdPbSlPOVL1nDJhUqVSU9hGA7A&oe=679A0B4C

Hmm
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/599352366/photo/drummer-don-henley-of-the-eagles.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=IwQqSz2oWbljuYtcr71RKNwxQpoqTtGwH2j7p1wb7_8=

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.