For fairly obvious reasons, I have dropped the subs to the politics channels I follow on YouTube, except for Steve Boots, because he is a zesty socialist who covers Canadian politics and his cat is constantly vamping in the background of his videos.
I’ve also filtered a few related words or phrases on Mastodon.
These things may change, but for now, it feels right. I still get a lot of news/doom through osmosis, anyway.
Yes, I changed email again. Why? Because I am mad, perhaps.
But also, I find I am less willing to do business with companies where the people in charge loudly blare their terrible views in public.
And it happens my main email service has one such person as its CEO. The company is doing damage control, stating they are non-profit, the CEO does not control the company, etc. It doesn’t matter, the rot is at the top. I’m not interested in supporting you with my dollars anymore.
So, I’ve gone from:
And now:
The one bonus in the latest move is I can now drop the “w” from my name and just use stanjames@fastmail.com. Plus, it sounds fast.
If Fastmail doesn’t work out, I am going to invest in carrier pigeons.
I never actually used Tumblr, but I did create an account awhile back for it. Unlike Meta’s properties, Tumblr doesn’t appear to care if you delete your account, because the process is:
It then confirms the account is gone and offers you to sign up (ho ho).
And now I wonder just how many other accounts I have on old-timey social media sites that are still shambling along, zombie-like.
There have always been good reasons to delete your Facebook account, but my inactivity over the last few years pretty much made the issue go away. If I ain’t using it, what harm is there letting the account go fallow?
This changed in the past few weeks, when Mark Zuckerberg decided to become macho or something (tip: You will never ever be macho, Zuck), pay fealty to God King Trump, and then decided to:
This is all in addition to the already running:
Today, I requested all of my FB info (mostly bird photos and various doodles). I already made a post letting actual human people know I’m deleting the account and pointing out I am easy to find elsewhere. The next step will be to request the deletion once I have my big ol’ FB info bundle (UPDATE: Shortly after I posted this, I got the info, just under 400MB worth at “medium” quality), then probably wait some period of time, probably 30 days, similar to the Instagram deletion.
It seems obvious now, but corporate controlled social media can probably never work. Mastodon might be a bit clunky, but there’s no billionaire or VC money behind it, just a bunch of federated servers relying on donations from individuals.
UPDATE: My Valentine’s Day gift to myself will be going Facebook-free.
It feels like more, but the total amount of culling this year has been relatively small, though a few major sites/services are included:
Dumping Substack and The Verge have saved me the most time, purging LinkedIn also provided some relief for my inbox.
What will get culled in 2025? We’ll know soon!
Yep, it happened.
Yesterday I went to the Verge homepage, but never clicked on anything. I appear to have not looked at any articles in the last few days, judging from my browser history. This makes sense, because I’ve de-prioritized the site since it added an “optional” subscription.
Today I clicked on the lead article and got this:
Yes, a paywall on the feature article, which was–hold onto your hats–about rearranging your home screen app icons. I did not get a Verge subscription, nor did I try any trickery to allow me to read the article. Instead, I closed the tab, removed the Verge from my new tab page list of bookmarks and will rarely check the site in the future.
I don’t begrudge the Verge wanting to extract money from its readers–you gotta cover expenses! But the way they are doing it sucks, and I’m not going to reward them (apart from the volume of clickbait junk opinion pieces is still too high, as well) with my money.
A partial/ambiguous paywall is bad design. It just is. I’ve barely looked at the site in the past week, so I don’t know if I’m getting hit by the paywall at random, if I reached my limit of “free” articles, or the feature article is paywalled by design. The pop-up doesn’t say, and I’m not going to dig around on my own to find out.
Asking people to fork over money and still serving them ads is also bad design. And tacky.
I don’t care about the newsletters. It’s not an enticement.
In a time when subscription fatigue is a real thing, the Verge has taken probably the second-worst approach to adding one (the worst would just be a complete paywall. I wonder if they’d still have ads then? Maybe!)
I don’t know how their two markets compare, but the way Ars Technica does subscriptions feels right to me:
Notice the last one? You get an ad-free experience and, knowing it is ad-free, subscribers get a layout that flows nicely without having to accommodate ads.
No content is locked behind a paywall. The sub is reasonable–as low as $25 per year. I like supporting the site this way and I get a nicer experience (to be clear, I do subscribe to Ars Technica).
Anyway, I suspect the Verge will do fine, since subs or not, they are still running ads. I’ll miss some of their content (but not their awful comments system). Having culled the site, I now have a tiny bit more time to devote to cat pics, so in a way, it’s win-win for me.
Posthaven was not bad and was a finalist in my “replace WordPress” quest/fool’s errand. But I just wasn’t using it, so even $5 a month was too much. It turns out if you stop paying before having made 12 monthly payments, they nuke your site, posts and account. But you get a thank-you message for trying them!
I assume they figure you won’t be back.
I guess I probably won’t be, if I have to commit to a full year to avoid starting all over from scratch again. I’m curious how well this model is working for them.
(And yes, this particular culling was inspired by the IG culling. It’s cullings all the way down.)
It turns out the last time I posted to Instagram was July 30, 2023, over 16 months ago. That seems to be a good indication of how much value IG brings to my life currently.
I downloaded my data–786 MB worth–then made a post today, announcing I would be nuking the account (more precisely, I used the metaphor of sending it into a black hole). Yes, I could just leave the account alone, “just in case” but I looked over the last few notifications and it appears that sexy bots with strange names are liking my posts. That makes me feel a bit icky. I’m pretty sure I do not need validation from sexy bots with strange names. I will not miss the site.
In a few days, I’ll go back and delete the account. I’m giving the handful of people I had “friended” there a little notice. Do I miss their posts? I mean, maybe a tiny bit, but not enough to keep me active and willing to post on a platform and through a company that sees genocide as a fair trade for engagement.
If I really want attention for my photos, there’s always Pixelfed or some other site or service. But I am finding a kind of unnameable pleasure in stripping away these sites and platforms that attract billions (of sexy bots). Maybe I’m regressing to my teen rebellion stage, pushing off the man, or the mainstream, or whatever. The mental headspace it clears up is nice, and the bonus is I no longer have that insufferable teen angst to go along with the rebellion. It’s just pure rebellion now, baby!
Here’s a photo of the sun-dappled Brunette River I took yesterday that you won’t find on Instagram:
Maybe the cloud isn’t all that. A few years ago I got a Synology NAS and it works pretty well. All of my photos from my phone are backed up effortlessly and I can access them from mobile using Synology apps. I can easily backup my camera photos, too, if I took the time to set it up. Right now I pay for the family plan for Microsoft 365, so Jeff and I can each get 1TB of OneDrive storage and access to the Microsoft Office apps.
But Word still drives me crazy, its permissions often create problems where none should exist, and there are free alternatives, like LibreOffice and OnlyOffice. My next renewal is in April, I’m thinking I might go with the NAS and open source apps instead. I just need to be prepared to provide tech support for the inevitable friction from making the move!
Basically, I am feeling this urge to pare back everything to The Olden Days of Computing, where everything was mostly local and the internet was for cats. I’m not saying I want to go back to floppy disks, but some things were better way back when.
I realized I hadn’t used my LinkedIn account for many years, and rarely at all.
I came to this realization because news began spreading today that Microsoft decided to use everyone’s LinkedIn accounts to train generative AI–by opting people in without telling them.
So with a few seconds of reflection (all that was merited), I closed my account. In two weeks it will be permanently gone, or perhaps “gone” because I have zero trust that these big tech companies actually purge data or honour the requests made by users.
Lifehacker story: LinkedIn Is Using Your Data to Train AI (but You Can Stop It)
And now, a cat:
This is just for my primary email account, which is used mostly for receiving newsletters and such. I have various others I use for various other things, but they get little in the way of messages. They mostly just sit idle in Thunderbird, just the way I like it!
My recent(ish) email history:
Now begins the task of moving the bulk of my mail over to Proton. I suspect my approach will be to do this very gradually, to minimize the drudgery. I’ll report more on actually using Proton Mail soon. So far, the UI is pretty clean, but it is mostly just email, not really trying to break no ground. But it doesn’t share my data with anyone (unless they’re not telling, which would make me sad).
A few years ago, I switched my primary email from Gmail to Outlook. My thought process was:
The switch took many months, but now virtually all of my email goes to my Outlook account. My Gmail account is largely vestigial at this point, though I do keep in active, in case I need to log in and find something from the Before Times.
You might see where this is going if you look at the first bullet point again. Under Satya Nadella, Microsoft has started turning into Google Jr., with an emphasis on ads, data collection/harvesting and everything I disliked so much about Google.
For example, this, when you use the new Outlook email client (which will eventually be mandatory across all platforms):
That 772 number varies by region (it can be even higher). I can duck some of this by using Thunderbird as my email client, which I do, and I’ve generally been happy with it.
But better yet may be using an independent company for my email, one that treats customers as customers, and not data to be mined. This means paying, of course, which is the primary disadvantage. I did this once before with HEY, and I found it a bit weird, but it brought some innovation to the email space. Then the owners of HEY revealed themselves to be Musk-championing tech bros of the worst sort, so I had to kill HEY. This was a bit painful, so I’m reluctant to do it again.
On the other hand, I write very few messages. Most of my email is in the form of newsletters, updates and things like that. This makes moving my account less painful than it otherwise might be.
The two options I’m considering are:
Both can integrate with Thunderbird, both have web clients (Proton’s is prettier, the Fastmail client is more just functional), pricing is similar, though Fastmail offers more storage (30GB vs. 15 GB). Proton offers additional privacy-focused services, though both emphasize privacy and security.
I am currently undecided, but doing a trial of each right now (Proton’s is technically costing me one U.S. dollar for a month).
I’ll have to decide one way or another fairly soon, so I’ll have an update in a few weeks. Whee!