
#deleteFacebook and social media effects on me - leonardofaria
https://leonardofaria.net/2018/03/28/deletefacebook-social-media-effects/
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fred_is_fred
Has there been any info/research into Instagram in tracking/sharing/stealing
info? I stopped using FB many years back and "deleted it" last year, but I
still have an IG account that predates the FB acquisition. I've not been able
to find any info on whether or not I should be worried about IG.

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Digital-Citizen
The "#deleteFacebook" tag is so quaint. It's quaint that anyone believes they
can "delete" their Facebook account, or that doing so would ever be up to the
user to decide.

Need evidence? The centralized nature of websites is structural evidence --
any service can offer you a "delete" button and let you think you're causing
that item to be deleted. In reality, service admins control what happens to
the data. Hacker News post revisions, for instance, could be kept at HN
admin's discretion.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16724962)
is a discussion about "Facebook Secretly Saved Videos Users Deleted".

Any time you rely on someone else's computer ("the cloud") to store your data,
you rely on them to act in accordance with your choices. This is basic 'how
information flows' stuff and it's still valid and still true.

Centralization is popular with admins because of the power it grants them. The
issues are much the same for "deleting" an account on some service as they are
for censorship power on web-based discussion sites because the same underlying
centralized structure is at work.

Website discussion forums are single points of censorship (including this
one); the same site deployment choices are made in order to allow the elite
few (site admins and those they choose to grant some morsel of censorious
power -- moderation point holders) to decide which posts are hidden (moderated
down so they're silently obscured) or promoted (moderated up so the thread
shows in default settings). And all of this is designed to be done in a mostly
unaccountable way by people whom you'll never identify. The differences from
one discussion site to another tend to be relatively minor, the running theme
of "don't you dare deviate from the narrative!" persists across
implementations.

So be careful; your past edits and ability to be heard are more in the hands
of people you don't know (and therefore can't trust) when you use sites like
these.

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bigphishy
Unbeknownst to the author, if you have an internet connection, there are an
infinite number of ways to communicate rather than use a closed-garden and
predatory medium like facebook.

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ReverseCold
Not only the author, most people don't realize this.

Can someone start selling an open-source/end to end encrypted/feature rich/etc
server called a "hub" or something that replaces all the closed gardens we
have today?

"Facebook" "Chat" "Reddit" etc but encrypted, local, and federated.

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StudentStuff
Mastodon Social and Signal seem to cover these use cases pretty well. Both
already have sizable userbases too.

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ReverseCold
Mastodon isn't encrypted, it's also decentralized in the same way email is
which tends to lead toward centralization.

Signal is centralized.

Are they better than Facebook and Facebook Messenger? Yes, of course.

(I use Mastodon though, the community is basically all Linux
users/sysadmins/developers/etc which is great.)

~~~
dasyatidprime
Having multiple viewpoints into the Mastodon universe myself, what I've
observed so far includes a lot of casual instance-switching and multiple-
accounts. Some instances certainly have a very high proportion of Linux-
oriented people; I see a lot of that from my primary account on
mastodon.technology, for instance. Other instances are completely different.

I see some major forces for counterpressure to centralization-gravity on
Mastodon:

(1) Mastodon starts with a homogeneous software base (ironically enough)
giving “standard” back and front ends—which is then AGPL, meaning that
instance owners can and do produce forks, but the forks cannot be held as
Secret SaaS for lock-in since anyone who can access the instance can copy the
source code from them. (It's probably possible to produce proprietary products
that interop through ActivityPub, but this is harder—and importantly, you'll
be the odd node out.)

(2) The idea of a “local culture” is prevalent and visible, with differences
in content policy, theming, and contents of local/federated timelines. The
forks from (1) can amplify this by acting like per-instance customizations
with “partial stickiness”. Being on casual-contact terms with your instance
administrator is also not uncommon and sometimes encouraged, whereas email is
much more impersonal.

(3) The pervasive visibility of (2), mostly from instances doing their own
CSS/text tweaks, provides a bridge to the “me but in a different social
context” cues that are often missing in centralized social networks, which a
number of people are starting to pay more attention to the need for. This
_while_ the interfaces remain basically isomorphic enough that there isn't a
major UI/model-learning cost to jumping between instances.

(4) Conversely to (3), for users that want efficient access, third-party
clients that support multiple accounts at once are very common. But a Web
browser also counts as an intermediate form of multi-account client— _so long
as_ your accounts are on different instances, which is thus encouraged _for
convenience_!

