It’s time to leave Facebook. It’s going to take some time. A few steps to establish some new social media accounts, but here’s the WIN.
Going To These Different Social Platforms
- Mastodon does not sell, track, or data mine your posts. Nor your friend’s posts.
- BlueSky is a Twitter clone without Mr. Musk’s rampant censoring while yelling “free speech.”
- PixelFed is an Instragram replacement. No data mining, no tracking, no harvesting for ai.
Leaving These Corporate/MAGA-Owned Platforms
- Facebook – 0.1 % friend content – a marketing and data harvesting platform
- Instagram – purchased by FB and now part of the FXCK ZUCK empire.
- Threads – ZUCK’s attempt at cloning Twitter. Still data mining and selling your identity.
- TikTok – easy decsision – will be revived by a MAGA billionaire as soon as T takes office
- Twitter – even after developing over 50,000 followers (NEVER PAY FOR X)
Here’s how the Fediverse works. Servers are distributed worldwide and not controlled by any single company. The data you create is not mined, shopped, or shared with other companies and marketing firms.
Starting Over on Social Media
Learn from a few of my early days of Twitter and Facebook mistakes.
Grow your audience wisely and with intention.
If you’re just going to follow as many accounts as possible to grow your own following you’ll quickly build a feed of incoming content that you care nothing about. I did a “growth” move on Facebook at one point, growing my “friends” to the maximum allowed number per account: 5,000. Then, as a result, I cared about 0.0001% of the 0.01% of the content of those new “friends” FB shared with me.
Don’t just unfollow the deplorables, BLOCK THEM. (Especially now, no Facebook. BLOCK.)
Find your tribes again on new social platforms.
I haven’t figured this out yet, but I will. Community online is cool when you have it. For most of us that looks like REMOTE WORK. My daily Zoom calls with my team always light me up, keeps us on the same page, and gives me a little bit of social tethering that is good for a creative with tendencies to flights of fancy.
My Social Tribes
My online activities mimic some of my real-world activities.
- tennis – offline lifeblood and exercise
- voteblueordie – political activism on the humanistic side of the aisle
- imreallyfknsorry – memes
- parenting – single dad – dating – relationships – life coach
Understand what your Tribes look and sound like. Learn to cultivate new tribes. Human 2 human tribes. Friends with affinities that match yours. We need each other. We need to get out from under the influence and manipulation of the corporate greed that is taking over our country today.
If you want to find me, here are my current links to the ALT-SOCIAL platforms I’m playing with.
bluesky: jmacofearth.bsky.social
mastodon: mstdn.social/@jmacofearth
pixelfed: https://pixey.org/jmacofearth
John McElhenney — LinkedIn