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Facebook are evil

Hearse Pileup said:
it's not really 'useful' until your mates are on it.
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That’s the trouble. I’ve got Telegram, Wire and (reluctantly) WhatsApp. It’d be great if they could all talk to each other, but they can’t. And there’s always one friend who only wants to use Facebook messenger. Which is something I’ll never have.

The Twitter thing I can’t be arsed with. I did the thing of following everyone back but you just end up with a completely unusable feed, and have to create lists in order to make it manageable.

I ditched my main twitter and went to a private account where I don’t tweet, I don’t allow followers, and only follow about 120 accounts, all local/news. No individuals. That way I can check local news without having to bother with what’s trending, which is always mince.

I have Instagram, but I still don’t really know what it’s for. I should really delete it. I can’t imagine what my mates would do with it.

So, aye, that’s a bit of a ramble from a generation Xer, who feels let down by technology. We were promised so much more! I should have realised it’d all be adverts.
 
danny la rouge said:
So, aye, that’s a bit of a ramble from a generation Xer, who feels let down by technology. We were promised so much more! I should have realised it’d all be adverts.
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I think you've hit the nail on the head tbh!

I mostly find it (mastodon) useful for getting gardening help. I've got some friends out there, and the general atmosphere is a lot more relaxed/positive (and by design your network is self selecting, which gets rid of a lot of the bullshit - self promotion doesn't really work there either).

I, unfortunately, have all of it. Even TikTok, because apparently that's how music gets done today. I spend most of my time posting from those accounts about how people's data is being used against them, and that - yes - I am using those facilities against them to show them these messages.

My favourite is really SSB - but that's more like a private diary that you share with a few people over bittorrent. I don't know anyone on there personally, but it's the most intimate social interaction I've had online out of any of them - I actually feel like I'm getting to know people properly.
 
danny la rouge said:
So, aye, that’s a bit of a ramble from a generation Xer, who feels let down by technology. We were promised so much more! I should have realised it’d all be adverts.
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Tbh that's me too, though I'm a bit younger than you I think. Fundamentally I don't like what the internet's become, and in general regard a lot of what's coming down the line in technological terms with foreboding. Twenty years ago it all seemed quite exciting and liberating, personally and possibly politically. It doesn't any more, and some parts of it that had become part of life I've now decided I'd rather be without. I've never been a big social media user but I don't use it at all now, am actively trying to avoid Google and the like, and have generally shrunk back my online presence quite a lot. Nowadays it's that which feels quite liberating.

As for this place, I reckon @longdog's prediction will come true and all the old regulars will still be here years from now, reminiscing about the internet as it used to be.
 
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Absolutely; I think the fediverse is useful for people who grew up with instant messaging and generally signing into services to meet new people, but forums are an older, more established convention for doing this. Similarly I now strictly control the permissions for all the apps on my phone, and really I would like to switch to a linux phone for my next device. Or maybe a portable linux computer and a separate phone for calls and SMS.

The internet is no longer the frontier it used to be; where you could log on and explore. It's now just a conveyor belt to feed you shit.

The problem is it's so ubiquitous now that if you want to... Reach out to new people? You're kind of stuck with the incumbent power structure of the net.

Some people talk about the 'Dark Forest' of the internet being the future; with all this activity on the top in the corporate sphere, and the true, valuable stuff happening in these discrete little communities that you'd never know about if you weren't part of it. I think Urban would count as one of those locations in the dark forest!

Damn... sorry that article appears to be paywalled now. I'll see if I can find another source.
 
Roadkill said:
am actively trying to avoid Google
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Yeah, me too. I use DuckDuckGo and have the app on my phone. I don’t really use YouTube except in conjunction with Urban, and never saw the point in having an account.

I notice translate will soon require you to sign in to use it. I don’t have a Google account, so I won’t be using it.

I completely agree with you on retreating from the internet. It’s become ugly.
 
danny la rouge said:
Just looked at SearX. I didn’t know what I was looking at. 😆
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Hahaha, yeah - like mastodon it's decentralised. So for example I use this instance:
search.privacytools.io

Searx instances

Online and offline Searx instances
search.privacytools.io search.privacytools.io

However I have to say that DDG is faster and more performant most of the time. I can live with the speed for the sake of more anonymity most of the time but it can get frustrating.
 
Facebook is not much good, and worse than Google in my opinion. Except for the Facebook owned WhatsApp, which is an excellent app.
 
With Google on Android I have disabled location history. It will literally keep a map of everywhere one has gone, otherwise, incredibly.
 
Some parts of the internet have definitely turned out badly, I am thinking of Facebook, Instagram, maybe TikTok. But other parts have turned out quite well like Twitter, Netflix, YouTube, even Amazon. I suppose it is just personal opinion.
Billions of people use Facebook, and I think it sort of appeals to the lowest common denominator, it is particularly bad.
 
On Fire said:
With Google on Android I have disabled location history. It will literally keep a map of everywhere one has gone, otherwise, incredibly.
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although that would be very useful if I were ever to be accused of a crime when I wasn't in that location at that time
 
mwgdrwg said:
Does Urban still have an IRC channel?
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Oh wow, I hope so!

The problem isn't really that one site is good or one site is bad On Fire; it's that Amazon, twitter, youtube, netflix, facebook, tiktok, and so on are all collecting information on you - signed in or not. They sell it back and forth to profile you and the demographic you fall into, and then based on this information provide people with the tools to nudge you in the direction of their interests. Be that a product that they know you'd be suggestible to be sold to for, or a political opinion that can either be challenged or at least used as bait to get a particular narrative to blow up in wider media.

I finished the doc mao, really enjoyed the last couple of points; about Facebook having a public and private stance on personal data, and about surveillance capitalism having an unregulated 20 year lead on the law. I just wish I shared Shoshana's optimism on the ability of democracy to do anything about it.

It's the whole corporate social media network that's the problem - and we don't currently have won't use the appropriate tools to do anything about it. Not at the scale that is required at least.

It's a shame how much of my career I've spent learning how to and then building flashy websites considering how much I've started to hate the internet

I should start trying to get set up as a blacksmith.
 
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Hearse Pileup said:
Nah, youtube is evil too. In fact in some ways it's one of the most insidieous as it's able to quite accurately profile who you are and what your tastes are.

And yet I still use it. 😖
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From my regular diet of history documentaries YouTube has deduced that lovely Filipino women want to meet me. :cool:

Apart from the profiling, I appreciate how YouTube provides a platform for enthusiasts and amateur scholars to make videos on subjects that interest them. These seem in large part to have supplanted the enthusiast websites of ten years ago and more and it's not hard to see why. YouTube has a huge and restless audience and in principle anyone has a chance of capturing some attention. Many people may also feel it's now easier to make YouTube videos to a good standard and upload them than it is to make a professional-looking website or even a WordPress blog.

Some of the best YouTube channels, featuring content made either by amateurs or people outside the traditional broadcast industry, can put together at least short documentaries that compete well with what's shown on satellite and terrestrial TV. Restricted budgets can mean that more information gets imparted per minute compared to dumbed-down TV documentaries with their interminable establishing shots and exotic locations: "Can a duck swim? To find out I've come to Fiji."

On the downside, any ugly fucker can make a website, while YouTube tends to reward the more telegenic. Advantages of wealth and background also percolate through, particularly in youth-oriented vlogging where endless clothes purchases are reviewed or, as with the Slo-Mo Guys, the whole point of your channel rests on being able to buy or lease a very expensive specialist video camera, as well as having the space to shoot watermelons, blow up aerosol cans and so on.
 
Doodler said:
From my regular diet of history documentaries YouTube has deduced that lovely Filipino women want to meet me. :cool:
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Strange, I'm married to a Filipino woman, coincidence? I THINK NOT.

Not to mention that pleasing the algorithm actually puts a block on what content works and leads to a tail-wagging-the-dog scenario



I agree that youtube is almost certainly better than network TV in many ways, but it's the data/surveillance capitalism part that really makes the situation horrible. As opposed to, say, Peertube (an activitypub implementation). It's a decentralised, federated YouTube alternative that streams using webtorrents - meaning that they're P2P. This lessens the need to have big central server farms as much, and allows your viewer to help you host streams to others.

But like with everything else federated; centralised Big Data has cornered the market and user base.

And because of this, I use it. Where else can I watch someone forge a flamberge blade based on the Soul Reaver? from the Legacy of Kain game franchise?
 
I've been thinking about this thread and if there are good examples of things that have flourished without selling their users' souls.

How about Wikipedia? It's wildly successful, open access, democratic and as far as I know is just funded by donations.

I'd love to say Mozilla, and the Mozilla Foundation do great stuff notably Mozfest, but sadly I think they get most of their income from Google, by making Google the default search engine in Firefox.

IRC kind of made a comeback in the form of Slack, but I don't think Slack is based on IRC any more. I loved the urban IRC channel so much! The only people I've come across using actual IRC still are OpenStreetMap types. OSM actually I guess is a success story, but not a runaway one like Wikipedia - however it definitely fills a need.
 
On Fire said:
www.bbc.co.uk

Facebook facing US legal action over competition

Facebook, which owns Instagram and WhatsApp, is accused of taking illegal steps to crush rivals.
www.bbc.co.uk
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Good news, but I'm not sure the approach will hold water - as FB say; the companies were a lot smaller when bought. The weight will have to be on the monopoly side and not on the legitimacy of the purchases.
Companies like this aren't going to give up their power easily. Still, I hope it shakes out well!

I saw this recently schared on the fediverse:


It's interesting to note that at least some companies are being actively held back from a fairer model by the SEC. Having your users as shareholders and giving them control over your business model is a good move forward in my opinion, roughly in the right direction.
 
All iPhone users force logged out on Friday across the world. Blaming a technical change.
Some with 2fa struggling to get back in.

www.engadget.com

Facebook inexplicably logs out iPhone users

If you use Facebook on an iPhone, then you might have been logged out suddenly on Friday night. Facebook said in a statement that this may be due to a "configuration change" and they're looking into it.
www.engadget.com www.engadget.com
 
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