The more I use this blog service at Micro.blog, and browsing Mastodon, the more I am not just enjoying my time “online” but growing ever more firm in the belief in the federated internet. ​ For a while now, I have grown tired and frustrated with the various social services I used, these included, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Reddit, and more recently Threads, and Bluesky. I was spending too much time using all of these apps, trying to keep up and battling my self imposed FOMO, I was most certainly developing a bad habit and this was never going to be good for my mental health. Some time ago, I began a process to ween myself away from some of this stuff.

First was Reddit. I decided to leave when they killed third party access for developers, and I almost exclusively accessed Reddit with one of those Apps, named Apollo. The native Reddit app was just terrible to use and partially out of protest to the leadership of Reddit, I quit browsing the site. I kept my account active and still reference the site for looking up answers and reviews of things, I just no longer browse it daily.

Next Twitter… or X… (what a stupid name change). Without getting too political, that service was done for me in a similar way as Reddit. Elon Musk after buying Twitter (for waaaaayyyy too much) killed third party developer access. Similar to Reddit… browsing Twitter with their native app was just terrible, filled with too many ads and an algorithm that was frustrating. Musk has become such a polarizing figure and for me, too much to feel comfortable using his service at all, I deleted my account and dived into Mastodon instead (more on them later).

Threads came along as a response to the Twitter exodus and to their business credit Meta was right to do so. I adopted it early on, and it seemed like it had promise. It was easy to use, had a proper timeline, and there were plenty of people and organizations to follow like I did on Twitter. Belonging to Meta, Threads has become another app/service that I am struggling to justify continuing to use. I will say more about Meta at the end of this post.

So, Bluesky has a very interesting history that I don’t want to rehash here. The short version is the App was developed by the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, and he wanted to make a service that more closely resembled the early days of Twitter and I believe he was mostly successful doing just that. He started slow, on purpose, to make sure he was building the service to be stable and not get too big too fast. In the beginning you actually had to obtain an ”invite” from Bluesky to even open an account. Once I was registered, it definitely had that early Twitter vibe and when the above mentioned exodus from X began their growth only ramped up. I still occasionally browse but I find that it just doesn’t keep me coming back the way Mastodon does. I maintain the account for now.

And now we come to Mastodon. Of all the services listed here, it stands in a very unique position and is also the hardest to explain. Rather than a single company or person, owning the service, Mastodon is a free and open sourced service from a non-profit organization. Mastodon has actually been around for quite awhile but like some of the others here it benefitted from the Twitter exodus and has seen a substantial growth. Mastodon is a part of what is called a Federated internet. In simple terms, when you create an account, you pick from thousands of servers called instances that are all run by separate administrators under license from Mastodon. It doesn’t really matter which instance you select, because by the nature of the federation, accounts on one instance can follow and be followed by accounts on any other instance. Using the service is much like using Twitter, or Bluesky, or even Facebook, you pick accounts to follow and their posts show up in your timeline. A big positive of this timeline is it’s chronological and remembers where you last left off and the timeline has no ads or an algorithm. I can’t stress enough how pleasing it is to casually browse accounts that I selected to follow and the posts are not interrupted with ads from companies I didn’t sign up to see. In addition, being open sourced, the service also allows for developers to develop apps for access to your Mastodon account, and from the many choices out there I fell in love with one made by a company called Tapbots named Ivory. I use this app and the service on a daily basis and I get quite of a lot of my tech news, sports fandom, and breaking news from this service.

It occurs to me that, when I started to write this post, I didn’t really have any idea how long it might turn out, thank you for sticking with me. I now come to the real reason for writing all of this. Meta. When Mark Zuckerberg, a second year computer science student at Harvard, stole the idea for what would become Facebook, then using it briefly to rank other female students as “hot” or “not”, he then did realize he was on to something much bigger. I am not going to rehash the history of the service and how he became the billionaire he is today, I am here to state why I am leaving all of Meta and to what extent for each of their apps. I joined Facebook in 2007, and in those early times, I quickly learned what I think is the biggest reason for having a Facebook account… staying in touch with friends and family that you might not otherwise even see in person much less talk with on the phone. I used it for sharing life events with family, both happy and sad, kept up with news, laughed at jokes and memes, pretty much the same as billions of other users. As a photographer, both amateur and professional, I was also an early adopter of Instagram, before Meta bought it. It was an amazingly simple app that really answered the question…What do I do with the camera on this phone?

As I have been self analyzing my online presence and usage of my time, I have also been keenly aware of the dark side of social media. For every heartfelt story of connections there are just as many hateful ones. I have never tolerated it and was a stringent user of blocking and unfriending those that I deemed to negative for my life. I have now come to the conclusion, for me personally, that is not enough. Meta makes their billions from ads, its really pretty simple, as you scroll your timelines and come upon an ad or an account that you did not follow or friend, Meta made a few cents or dollars from that view. Yep… you don’t even have to click the ad, Meta gets paid for views not just click throughs. There is a saying with tech companies and their services, if you didn’t pay for the service, you are the product and they sold you someone else. Meta recently made the decision to halt their moderation (as lousy as it was) and now rely on community moderation (which never works the way they say it will) I no longer want to feed Meta more of my time. Meta only makes money from me if I use their their services, so I will be deleting the apps. It won’t register as even a blip in the Meta monthly bottom line, but I think I will feel better. I will keep my accounts, at least for the near future just in case I do have to return for some reason but my usage of them will be null.

I am teased on the regular for making what should be a short explanation into a long diatribe, and I think I did it again. I am going to continue to write here as frequently as I can because if for no other reason than I like doing it.

D