While just a year ago I deleted my Mastodon account but almost 2 years ago I just deleted most of the mainstream medias, I remember that my wife was concerned about it, “You would regret it” she said, but at that time I was completely serious about the commitment, so in a couple of weeks I just deleted almost everything.

Now that the time has past, I have to say, It has being a great decision, I do not consider coming back at all, and overall looks like some of my friends have following this trend.

However, there are some sites that still come back:

• Reddit, when I want to read opinions from a specific topic.
• Youtube, Probably is still some kind of social media, that has some utility, but is a little fight ongoing.
• Linkedln, I avoid as much as I can the feed (probably one of the worst I have ever seen), only open it when I need to answer a question by some recruiters or job searching.
• Chat Apps, a mix of Whatsapp/Signal and Line. To talk with friends, family and for work purpose.

The problem with social engineer media.

When I was discussing with some friends about it, probably one of my best argument of why not to use this kind of apps was the problem of privacy, in part, I think this argument while is an important one, was less effective to convince someone of leaving their Facebook or Instagram account. I would argue that this line of argument doesn’t help to show a negative impact on the user (many people fail to dimension the consequences). But a more interesting approach is to tell someone how his worldview, emotions, preferences, and his political views has been engineered by these platforms and therefore tech companies and large business.

It can be sound extreme, but I would argue that most people have a feeling about this, and cannot deny such a reality.

And Federated platforms?

While the Fediverse sounds neat, I still think that is just another rabbit hole, that most of the time is not worth it to be part of, Mastodon, Lemmy and other platforms (specially the ones that work like Twitter and Reddit) fall into a similar problem, in these cases, maybe it is not an algorithm involved, but the network effect still is present, and can affect you in a similar way.

For other side, also I grew a bit apathetic to this idea of getting online friends, or belonging to an internet community, at this time with the LLM generated content that has populated the online space, I would be more happy with just downloading the information I need, and work offline in my stuff.

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