Where to find me now?

After deleting my Facebook account I decided to reorganize my social media life. There are many, many arguments why to leave Facebook: a "simple" privacy preference, unwillingness to allow mass-manipulation of votes by data mining companies, fear of a potential addiction to likes/shares and shortening our attention spans.

For me the most important was the realization that Facebook is manipulating me directly. I began seeing that only a small subset friends and news articles appear in my feed. I could try countering that with few options like "unfollow" and "close friends", but that would only give the giant more data about me! While I somehow accepted that every single like I click gets quantified and sold, the outrage porn Facebook served me every day and a strong disincentive to contact my less-polarized friends strongly affected my worldview and well-being.

I no longer wish to take part of that. I'm not interested in outrage porn and clickbaits, especially knowing how much I enjoy them. Instead, I want to read more worthwhile articles, blogposts and books. My Pocket is full of things I can read instead of mindlessly scrolling another infinite stream.

After unfollowing r/funny and similar, I want to still use Reddit for discussions with a variety of communities, and I leave my Twitter account to contact people who persistently ignore emails. You won't see me sharing a lot on these two, though.

All of the longer articles will stay on this blog, and I have some really interesting ones waiting to be published. Remember you can subscribe to RSS with any client you want!

For more frequent updates, book and music recommendations please check out my Mastodon. It's an awesome new federated social network which allows people from different servers to communicate with each other, blue bird-style. There are no magical algorithms, the messages are sorted chronologically - so it's much harder to hijack your attention! Mastodon is beautifully explained in this video - it's a part of Fediverse, similar to Diaspora I used to contribute to some years ago.

I feel that the decision to leave Facebook has made me a better, more focused human being and I recommend you to consider the same. True, I'm not invited to as many events as before, but now I know that I stay in contact with my true friends, not just the ones suggested by somebody or something.