I remember what made me quit facebook, way before it became Meta: the TV serie Person of interest. It gave me a big awarness of the scale of mass surveillance. I already had the project to quit because of Zuck’s shenanigans and the lack of interest i had in the platform, but this was the last straw for me.
Reddit API change, I never use any others
Snowden revelations in 2013
I quit Reddit when they killed third party apps, I quit Twitter when Musk bought it.
I didn’t delete my accounts, I just use them much less.
I didn’t exactly force myself, it’s just that every time I are then doing shitty things I automatically associate their socials to the dire political situation in the US so I end up not using them.
Also, the advertisement: there’s none in the fediverse, when I’m on the big tech apps I’m not used to adverts anymore
I left fb when I realized I was on it out of obligation and not because I wanted to be on it. The experience was degrading minute to minute. So I just decided to delete the account one day.
Never been on Twitter as I find in rather dumb long before it was bought by Musk. I am still hanging onto my reddit account because some of the communities are not there elsewhere.
I don’t consider anonymous forums social media so I’ve never had a social media account.
I killed Instagram and Whatsapp recently when Mark started buddying up to Trump.
Deleted Twitter shortly after Elon took over, which bummed me out since it was a good place for software development information.
Quit reddit after the API ordeal when I didn’t want to use the official client.
I was a long time user of each platform, and I was bummed when I had to leave each.
Now I have bluesky, lemmy, mastodon, and some occasional discord servers I hangout on. I miss Instagram as a time waster, but I’ll survive without funny dog videos and fitness models.
Loops.video is a great insta/tiktok replacement for dog/cat videos at least.
How do I follow loops.video contents from pixelfed?
That I am less sure of. The only way I got in was making a separate account at loops.video and downloading the app.
I don’t think it’s federated yet
I quit Reddit and deleted my account after nearly a decade last week. I just found it to be a source of consistent stress. It got to the point where the most innocuous comments kept getting me temporarily banned from subreddits. The final coffin nail was when somebody posted an article about how the Trump administration scrubbed all the information on HIV/AIDS from government health websites. I replied in the comments, “Double plus good.” Apparently Redditors thought that I was endorsing this censorship as a good idea and downvoted me. So to clarify, I edited my comment and said underneath, “For those downvoting me, read the novel 1984 by George Orwell.” That’s all. I didn’t say, “You fucking idiots need to read a goddamn book!” I simply cited the reference for my original comment. For this statement I got a three day ban not just from the subreddit but all of Reddit due to harassment. The ban was automatically imposed by the bots, so I had an opportunity to appeal and have a real person review it. I did so, fully expecting anybody who actually looked into it to be reasonable, but they kept the ban in place, so I decided enough was enough.
I think people don’t even realize the scale of the removals, because when it isn’t banning you the platform goes out of its way to hide it from you when your comments are removed, it looks like it is still there while you are logged in but no one else can see it, I only even find out by using the reveddit extension, and I’ve been banned from subreddits just for mentioning that there’s a way to do this. It’s usually a totally innocuous comment that gets removed, assuming they just have a keyword that triggered a bot or a mod just didn’t like what I said and clicked delete. What they’re doing can hardly be termed ‘moderation’ anymore.
The use of automated tools that blindly ban based on keywords and the subreddit is out of control. As you found there is NO attempt to put anything in context. Truly moronic administration that violates their claim to be a “place for discussion”. I got in trouble because I left a comment questioning antivaxxers in an antivax subreddit and suddenly got flooded with bans across reddit because I had left a comment in a politically incorrect subreddit. They use scripts to moderate. Of course there is NO recourse, no mods will listen to you, no reddit admin of the mods to contact, nothing.
My feeling is reddit has reduced discourse to bad puns, nothing even slightly controversial, must agree with the sub’s echo chamber and ads, lots of ads. If you go against the herd you will be culled. Just smile and nod.
They wish to drive away the people who wish to speak the truth. I created an account here yesterday to hedge against Reddit becoming even more of a cesspool.
Musk unbanned Trump from Twitter.
My family relied on Facebook messenger for communication for a long time so I only just recently deleted it and Instagram after Zuck announced hate speech was explicitly allowed
Setup a matrix instance with a meta bridge and use that to slowly get rid of meta altogether. Works both for messenger and Instagram dms.
Didn’t realize there was a meta bridge to messenger. That’s dope
Thankfully my family shifted to iMessage a while ago and at least that’s encrypted and doesn’t support the meta business. I deleted all of my Meta accounts already
Everyone I followed on Twitter left for Bluesky
Twitter/X was easy for me, as soon as Musk touched it I closed that account. Wasn’t too active on there anyway.
Still on Instagram but planning to close that soon. Facebook is a bit trickier with all the older friends/family on there that probably won’t move elsewhere. Then again most of the friends/family I see regularly already stopped posting/commenting on Facebook so there’s a lot of dead accounts on there.
Left Reddit during the API exodus.
The isolation and limitations of my physical disability made the “share a fake polished version of yourself and experiences” untenable for me after the first two years. Watching everyone else’s lives grow and change is deeply painful for me when I’m forced to reflect on my stagnation and severe limitations.
I was done with Facebook before Trump 1.0 even happened. Never got into Twitter. Left reddit with the API Exodus. Lemmy is top 2 social media for me these days.
What made me leave Facebook was discovering Reddit. What made me leave Reddit was getting banned lol. What made me leave Twitter (or never actually ever bother much with it) is that it seems more like a big popularity contest than ‘social’ platform to me. Besides, if it was really social, there wouldn’t be a character limit that benefits marketing speak and hashtags more than constructive conversation.
Never saw the point of places like Instagram that are based on being able to upload photos. Big deal, you can upload photos anywhere. And the only time I use YouTube is when I’m in the mood for music videos. I have less than zero interest in watching people’s crappy home videos, it’s like reality TV but even more boring and brain rotting. And I’ve got better things to spend my time watching. Oh, and I tried TikTok but noped out very quickly. I see absolutely no value in being spoonfed content by some shady algorithm as opposed to choosing and curating your own content.
Personally, I do not care if the platform that I’m on uses my data to advertise to me. I fell in with the ‘privacy’ crowd like a decade ago and did my time shaking my fists at big brother but I just don’t care anymore. None of this is new. As long as the people on the platform are the kind of people that I could get along with, I’m fine. And quite capable of using an ad blocker if I so desire. I couldn’t care less if Reddit used my posts in the Xena or She-Ra subreddits to advertise romance fantasy novels to me. There’s more important things to focus on.
back when one could make the little text ads in facebook i saw how one could use the facebook graph to basically zero in on one person and then thought “wow this is gross imagine if i was a bad faith actor zero-ing on one facebook person to target them repeatedly through these little text ads” and that was enough for me off of facebook.
that was like 2008 or so.
when I saw the graph and the possibilities of bad actors abusing it i drove myself off most social media. here isn’t too bad. i like the federated nature.
