Sunday, November 3rd, 2024

That's the End of That

On Monday, I finally got around to telling Facebook to delete my account one last time. They require you to go 30 days without logging in before they'll actually do it.1 They know you're hooked and make sure to leave enough time for the shakes to set in and have you crawling back for some of that sweet, sweet content. Only, I'm not sure how addictive the Facebook product is anymore. I have no plans to return.

I deleted my account ages ago and lived happily enough without FB for years. Then COVID-19 hit us. At the time, it seemed important to at least try to reconnect with old friends and acquaintances before we all died in the plague, and lots of people were already using the site, so I created a new account. Unfortunately, despite my better efforts, I really only rekindled one relationship of note, and that person doesn't even use Facebook. Eventually, those of us who survived the worst of the plague slowly started to reenter what we're calling society now.

Fast-forward to Monday, and my feed is almost entirely advertisements, generative-AI images of '90s grunge bands with rambling generative-AI tales of backstage gossip, and various Reels featuring recycled TikToks of weird and unpleasant people. I recently audited my feed again and found there to be a single post from someone I knew or a group I followed for every three to five "suggested for you" bits of clickbait, two or three advertisements, and one panel suggesting two-and-a-half Reels featuring clips from Joe Rogan, the Whatever podcast, and various aspiring flat-earth and ancient aliens conspiracy theorist hacks.2

I can already imagine my mother arguing, "If you go to the sidebar, scroll way down to the hidden section here, then right-shift-triple-click this button, it opens this page here, and then you just open this tab to see only content posted by people on your friends list."

And she is correct. You can do that, and sometimes, after a minute or so, the hidden OnlyFriends page will even load. Whenever it finally does, though, I'm reminded that almost none of my friends and family post anything on Facebook. There are about three of them who post once or twice a day and another ten or so who post something every few weeks, but otherwise, it's crickets.

I'm still liking Mastodon, though. I've been maintaining my own little instance for around a year. 3 If you add a few filters, unfollow people sooner rather than later, and go hard on the mute and block buttons, it's a pretty good vibe. And you hardly ever get ambushed with pictures of big ol' dongs on your timeline.4

  1. Personally, I think there should be a strongly enforced federal law that any site allowing you to create an account must provide and prominently surface5 an equally low-effort means to immediately remove that account and initiate a process to delete any data and personal information from the provider's systems as well as from any third-party data brokers, but what do I know about these things?6 ↩︎

  2. I have zero interest in any of these things. Why do they even bother invading my privacy by tracking everything I look at online if this is the best they can do with the information? ↩︎

  3. If you're a friend or family member of mine, I can set you up with an account on my instance to try it out. Mastodon is a lot like what you'd get if Twitter and your email address had a baby.7 ↩︎

  4. A lot of people on Mastodon are into showing off their dongs. You may be against censorship in theory, but when choosing a Mastodon instance, you probably want one with more rules and moderation than less. Trust me on this one. ↩︎

  5. Surfacing is industry jargon for making something more or less easy to find. ↩︎

  6. I previously worked in a technical capacity alongside the Legal department on Xfinity's Privacy Program for roughly four years, during which time, I routinely discussed compliance with CPPA, CPRA, GDPR, etc, and customer data handling policies and practices with senior leadership, including multiple C-suite executives. ↩︎

  7. Some gripe about the comparison to email, often because they like to imagine Mastodon is somehow the height of human technology, but it really is a lot like an email server. You can have an AOL account and move to Hotmail. You'll lose most of your old messages, but all your friends on AOL can still reach you at the new address without having to set up Hotmail accounts of their own. And you can keep a secret Yahoo! Mail or two on the side for your freaky weirdo stuff you don't want people to know about. ↩︎

fats waller - your feet's too big

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