I know Twitter was addictive, but dear god, you’ve got to stop.
I gotta admit I don’t understand the scientists still posting to twitter as that site’s owner slashes all their funding and mass fires thousands of their colleagues.
I went cold turkey in November of 2023. You can do it!
You’re not on Facebook, are you? Sorry, you need to kick both habits.
Nature: ‘A place of joy’: Why scientists are joining the rush to Bluesky
Science: Like ‘old Twitter’: The scientific community finds a new home on Bluesky
Stat: Bluesky is the new destination for X/Twitter’s health and science community. Here’s why
I got an internal email newsletter the other day with a bit from my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss…I’m at the bottom of a long ladder…with a link to an X announcement. I wept.
I’ve been off Twits for a long time…in fact, never used it really. I’m trying to switch from FaceBook to other platforms…sadly I’m addicted to Reels on Meta/FaceBook/Instagram. Not that Alphabet/Google is any better, but I’m using YouTube more.
A couple of friends have moved to Bluesky, so I’ve been giving it a try.
Of course, all of this is starting to get me down and perhaps can just check into a hospice to get a life altering medication.
I stopped looking at Twitter a few days after Musk bought it and started wrecking it.
And never missed it for one second.
My new fun place is Bluesky.
Bluesky is everything Twitter isn’t.
And it is a really fun place.
There are a lot of ways you can customize your feed.
And you can set up multiple feeds for different purposes.
My main feed has a lot of cat photos, a lot of comics, some science and medicine, some rock/punk music, some news.
I also have two news feeds I look at every day.
Some of the posters I follow, I know from real life, not personally but through their work.
Two would be the authors Seanan McGuire and John Scalzi.
I never got into Facebook and lost my account a decade or so ago.
My crime wasn’t uploading all of my personal information to Facebook so they could sell it.
Almost none of my Boomer cohort is on Facebook.
We come from the era where it wasn’t considered necessary or even a good idea to upload your entire life so that some multi-billionaire could exploit it.
It wasn’t useful, it wasn’t fun, and when Zuckerberg turned into a MAGA creep, it became pure malevolence.
Facebook isn’t cool, it is evil.
X is reportedly blocking links to secure Signal contact pages
As of last month, Twitter has disabled the script that would let you bulk-erase your tweet history. https://upriseri.com/fight-back-how-to-bulk-erase-old-tweets-for-free/
If anyone knows an easy way to do this, please post. (Also for FB.)
I don’t want to terminate the accounts because (a) don’t want some nogoodnik to use my name, and (b) not sure if the companies truly erase your tweets.
I know there were some cheap apps that could erase, say, 5K tweets at a time, but I could never get them to work properly.
Those in our organization have never actively participated in social media. In the dim past it seemed quaint and acceptable for grandma’s to share with the family on social media. But, it is dangerous to put a lot of personal info out there. ‘Hey, i’m going on a two week vacation to Latvia’ translates to ‘go ahead break into my house while I’m gone’.
And, now the dialogue on most social media sites is downright corrosive Not to mention they all enrich the abusive obscenely wealthy aholes that own/control them.
I hope bluesky remains benign.
I wonder how long until bluesky goes the same way as twitter?
dangerousbeans, dunno, but there are certain suggestive facts:
1: Noah Glass, Evan Williams, and Biz Stone co-founded Odeo, later renamed Obvious Corporation, which then spun off Twitter, Inc. Dorsey became Twitter’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO).[18][19] As CEO, Dorsey saw the startup through two rounds of funding by venture capitalists.[20]
2: In February 2022, Dorsey joined the board of directors[75] of Bluesky Social, a Twitter spin-off developing a decentralized social networking protocol and app.[76][77] In May 2024, he announced he was no longer on the board of directors.[78][79][80] He instead endorsed X, which he called “freedom technology”.[81] In a 2024 interview, Dorsey said that Bluesky’s shift toward a traditional corporate structure and the introduction of centralized moderation tools were major factors behind his leaving the company.[82]
(Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Dorsey)
I agree on X-twiiter since that has been totally taken over and become a den of nazis but I disagree on facebook which still has its uses and some really good people sharing good things – memes, news articles, ideas, science including local spoecies iID’s of flara and fauna, etc .. I don’t think Zuckerberg is a as bad as Musk or that the netziens of fb as as bad as those on X-twitr.
Also If everyone does leave fb then the reichwing wins and takes over and ruins that too & Ireally don’t want that to happen.
I’ve never had either Facebook or Twitter
Tend to hang on YouTube as I like the old movies and art stuff
StevoR–
Zuckerberg may not be as bad as Musk, but he’s still terrible. Cambridge Analytica. Blocking Canadian news access in the middle of wildfires. Lobbying against whistleblower protection. Misleading advertisers with distorted metrics. Buying out rival companies to remove competition. And let’s not forget, cancelling all fact-checking to suck up to His Royal Trumpness.
StevoR
You are grossly mistaken. Staying on X/Facebook is the worst possible thing you can do. The nazis already own those sites. They like it because they still have lefties to bully and are backed up by the owner of the site so nothing can ever happen to them and they can do what they want. If they lose those bullying targets, those sites will go the way of all the other right-wing exclusive social media, it’ll become obscure, wither and die. Because the bullying is an essental part of the experience.
The only winning move is to not play their game. Leave and never look back.
@ ^ AugustusVerger : I totally disagree and since I’m on fb and you aren’t I think my lived & current experience counts for a lot more than your asserted opinion here. So, no.
@12. chrislawson : “Zuckerberg may not be as bad as Musk, but he’s still terrible.”
Agreed. I NOT a fan of Zuckerberg at all but setting its odious owner aside; fb as a platform and social media medium (if that’s not putting it too tautologously) still works pretty well including for organising left-wing events such as refugee vigils and protests among its many other uses. I do wish someone else was in charge of course but it isn’t exclusively a reichwing site & there’s a lot of very good leftwing – & science – groups and progressive people still using fb FYI..
Sorry, StevoR, but I think your main motivations are addiction and habit, not any sort of more lofty goal, or you wouldn’t have tried such a poor argument to deflect my point.
Bluesky now lets users restrict replies to followers
@15. AugustusVerger : How was my argument or rather observations based on actual current experience “poor” exactly? I think you are letting your antipathy towards fb over-ride logic and reality here.
I stay on FB. I have 59 familly connections I use every day. Birthday parties etc plus day in the life stuff.
I run several RPG groups and track event calendars with them.
I have connection to dozens of SIGs in the areas of science and politics.
Only when I’m bored to I trawl the dumb argument spaces.
I deleted FB not too long ago.
I also deleted Tumblr, Instagram, Pinterest, Threads, Behance, and Youtube.
Days back, suffering through small withdraws, I went back on FB and Instagram for a short time only to delete them both once more. Man, I gotta stop suffering though withdraws and stay off those sites for good.
I don’t have an Twitter/X account anymore, either.
13 AugustusVerger
Its right up there with eating babies?