Why I left facebook. And twitter.

"You can post anything you like, because we are all for free speech. Here is a list of things you're allowed to like."

That is what it began to feel like on twitter a little time after the new owner took over. By then I had my place on the Fediverse already, which many people generally call "Mastodon".

More and more right-wing, previously banned bad people were allowed back there, like Alex Jones and Donald Trump. * Note that 'bad people' here is used from my perspective. If you love such people, you're reading the wrong blog.

Twitter was renamed to the now well known 1-letter places. The x is something Elon Musk seems to be fond of. (Are we talking about Texla yet?) For me, things got more and more dire, so leaving there was necessary.

I tried to bring people over to the Fediverse ("Mastodon"), but they didn't want to leave their 'tribe', I guess, or tribes were more important that principles. My principles were more important to me than tribes. Exit twitter.

Lately, Markie Zuckerberg has great plans for facebook. No more 3rd party moderation teams, but Community Notes are coming back. This means moderation of all the crap that got filtered out is going down the drain, and also right-wing / hatespeech will prevail again. Maybe not that fast, but it will happen. Again I tried to convince people to leave that place, but the same thing happened. Everyone's there, and damn any principles, I guess.

Or it's just about 'knowing each other', while more and more AI and politics are cluttering the already unmanageable mess the facebook feed is. Even plugins like FBPurity keep struggling to keep out that mess.

So I'm on 'Mastodon'. At least on that network, which is the federation universe (Fedi Verse). I'll spare you the tech of an own instance, ask me if you feel so inclined.

If you are interested in exploring Mastodon, I urge you to read this post by a good friend of mine: https://world.museumsprojekte.de/registrar-trek-goes-mastodon/

It's lengthy but good.

TL;DR: get your ass over there now, worry about a 'good' instance later. You can always move.

Unless you want to remain governed by algorithms and "suggested for you", as if you can't make up your own mind. 😉