Facebook
This month, after 18 years, I was banned from Facebook.
It’s hard to know why. No explanation was forthcoming, beyond ‘community standards’. I’d never had so much as a comment deleted before, except for one that was rejected when I called someone a Nazi (on account of him being a Nazi.)
It’s not that I wasn’t abrasive or rude. On the contrary, for years I laid into the cruel and stupid with abandon. It’s possible that the reason I appeared more or less immune to moderation was that the haggard staff reading my posts enjoyed seeing someone giving the worst people on the site a taste of their own medicine - but that’s speculation.
What I do know is that along with Twitter, Facebook has changed as its owner has embraced increasingly right-wing positions. I was seeing more and more racist and transphobic content in my feed without asking for it. I tried blocking, hiding, and ignoring it to no avail. Reports indicate that Facebook is actively promoting right wing content while suppressing the left, in particular over Gaza.
This, along with an increasing emphasis on automated moderation replacing human discretion with LLMs calibrated to promote right-wing views likely meant my days there were always numbered.
Another sinister element was that the site demanded a scan of my face to “prove I was human” before telling me I was banned, presumably to gather data and keep me from registering another account. I haven’t tried.
Enshittification
We were warned that these proprietary walled gardens would lock people in, unable to leave without losing their content and connections to the people they follow, and that the owners of these platforms could one day abuse that control.
That day has come, and every big social media platform has become a hellscape - quite aside from the political bias of these sites, they’ve simply become obnoxious to use.
We need to start taking federation and decentralisation seriously or this will be our online experience going forward.
If you have connections you value on places like Twitter or Facebook, I’d recommend making a spreadsheet of them, and asking each friend for their address on a safe medium.
Safe Ways to Stay in Touch
- Telephone - Can’t really go wrong with texting.
- Email - Clunky as it is, it’s an open protocol.
- Local Haunt - I love the fact that I have two or three cafes where I can just say to someone “leave a message for me with the staff at X” and know I’ll get it.
Safe/Decentralised Venues
- Matrix Element - Secure, encrypted, federated chat. Does everything Discord does but with more flexibility and less spam. Slightly worse at screen sharing.
- Mastodon - Twitter, if twitter wasn’t racist and painful to use.
- Signal & Telegram - Designed for security. They have their flaws and they aren’t decentralised, but they live or die on providing secure communications.
- A Homepage! - It’s a little more work, but there’s nothing like a space you have complete control over and publish yourself. I write this in markdown using Typora, export to HTML with some rules to add the .css link, and have a little python script to turn a plain text list of articles into an rss feed. I’ve tried to keep everything as barebones as possible
Use but don’t rely on
- Bluesky - The site who would be Twitter. Makes federated noises but still proprietary and still vulnerable to enshittification.
- Discord - Sketchy in various ways but it’s useful.
- Tumblr - I actually love Tumblr. You can make posts as long as you like, with all kinds of content and formatting. When you reblog something you create a copy, so if the OP gets banned or leaves or deletes it you’ve still got it preserved. The community there are insane and nice, for the most part. I almost never see AI art there because everything that reaches me has been reshared by so many human hands. But it’s been sold several times and has only avoided enshittification because it’s become too niche.
Toxic Venues
- Facebook - Avoid if you can. If I were still there I’d use it strictly on my terms. There’s a browser extension to block the newsfeed, so you only see your own lists and groups. I’d install that, organise my friends into lists, and create a bookmark page of groups and lists and simply browse from that. I would not engage with the garbage the algorithm throws at you at all.
- Twitter - Again, best to stay away, or delete all your posts and keep the account open as a point of contact.