There has been a shift within cloud services such as Google, Facebook and others. That shift is to make migrating photos from one service quick and easy. The old fashioned method would be to download media from service A before re-uploading it to service B. This requires lots of space on hard drives and this could be a luxury you do not have, especially with laptop drives being as small as they are.
Recently my Social Media Life has become dormant. I do visit Facebook every so often but I ignore Instagram, barely touch Mastodon or the fediverse, and in general have stopped looking at social media for a social life. It’s not that my life offline has become vibrant. It’s that online is empty of meaningful engagement, especially in winter.
From the nineties right up to around 2018 or so social media was a place to meet and be social.
A few weeks ago Facebook (I refuse to whitewash that company by calling it Meta) decided to blackmail European users. The deal was simple. We were coerced. “Accept to pay for Facebook or we will force you to see ads. This was a lose lose situation that the European Union is now fighting. Imagine being given this choice. If you pay you’re going to be rewarding a company that has abused us.
Recently I reverted to Facebook due to the death of Twitter, but also because of the political bias I see on Mastodon instances. That political bias has encouraged me to take a break from that social network until the conflict is over.
Critical Mass Yesterday I saw that two people on Facebook discussed leaving Facebook just at the time when I am returning. I am returning for two reasons. The first is that with three billion people you’re more likely to find people who think like you do.
Over the last two or three days I have played with the idea of returning to Facebook. There are several reasons for this. The first reason is that Facebook has three billion people and you can find people local to you, which is a huge plus. The second reason is that with Facebook we can find activity based communities for hiking, climbing, cycling and more. We’re talking online but with local communities it becomes easier to meet people in person, rather than remaining isolated online.
For those of us living in Europe we now have the option of paying for Facebook and Instagram, not to see ads. In theory this is fantastic and we should be jumping on the opportunity.
I don’t feel that way. I had plenty of conversations, with uni friends, colleagues and more, until Zynga brought Farmville. When Farmville spammed our timelines and killed all conversations the value of Facebook as social network was destroyed because instead of conversing and networking we were taking care of virtual farms.
A few weeks ago I was completely opposed to Threads being connected and accepted by the Fediverse because I hated the idea of 100 million users flooding a social network with 10 million users. Now that threads has imploded I feel differently.
Now that Threads is the same size as the Frediverse, or at least closer to being the same size, the impact of the two joining up would be diminished.
It’s interesting that we can stop using a website that is so integral to our lives for years. During the pandemic I quit facebook because I was flamed and trolled at a time when I needed friendship and support. Facebook has been known to make people depressed. During lockdown I decided to quit Facebook and Instagram.
Quitting FB and IG I quit them for two reasons. The first is that I no longer got anything positive out of them.
Yesterday Facebook, discguised as meta, and Meta, disguised as Instagram launched Threads. Threads is meant to be a twitter competitor. The paradox is that Facebook has always been a twitter competitor, and this has become more evident with every iteration of both social networks. It is paradoxical that Facebook would need threads, to compete with Twitter.
Not Available in Europe Threads, at the time of writing this blog post is not available in Europe because it requires data, which brings it in breach of GDPR rules.
Years ago we heard that Facebook was a silo. What was meant by this term is that FaceBook would pull content into its social network and behave like a portal, without allowing people to leave. It encouraged people to see the World Wide Web as Facebook and nothing else. For a while it worked.
Zynga and The Death of Conversation When FB was young, and vibrant it was a network of friends having a chat, until Zynga came along.