Goodbye Meta (Facebook)

Of all the companies I didn't really enjoy using the products of, Meta (Formerly Facebook) would have to be top of the list. 

Facebook went from useful to quite awful to use. Remember when you used to see a feed of your friend's activities, not some random "influencer/news/personality/short video?  I have used Facebook since 2009, and watched it grow from a semi-useful social media website to an utterly deranged feed of nonsense, AI generated content, or just biased slop, continually fed into your face so you can't put it down. 

It's like a large septic tank full of misinformation, clout chasing pages, false science, false religion, and sometimes some cute pet photos. It's a septic tank that everyone's diving in to look for a lost ring or diamond in, everyone inadvertently making it that much worse for everyone else.

Government spying is getting worse, (not that there's much I can do). A government might (but likely doesn't, and shouldn't) have a need to go looking into our lives, and there's not much I can personally do to stop it, but the same cannot be said for megacorporations spying on people too. It's quite frankly creepy. Especially Meta, as they have been caught many times siphoning data they don't need in order to sell it. I detest behavior like this (And yet, like a hypocrite, I still use some Google, Apple, etc products, but one thing at at time).

 

I am not a stranger to doing odd things to regain control of things I own. To start with, in general, I buy "dumb" or industrial versions of products, refuse to install a company's app on my phone in lieu of using a web based version (as a browser installed on my phone is under my control, with my choice as to whether ads are shown), or jailbreak and/or physically solder a 50 Ohm resistor across the antenna connectors for things like Smart TVs or smart home appliances I couldn't find a dumb version of, that have to store personal information in some capacity to work. 

 

 There is no reason an air fryer, washing machine, or even coffee machine needs a network connection to function, and yet more and more of these have them, and sadly, more and more of these either lock basic functionality behind a paywall, require an app that shares considerable amounts of data to murky third parties, or just do it because they were too lazy to install a button and a 7 segment LED display. 

 

For me, removing Meta is about ownership and control of my own thoughts. There is limited time to attain life goals. I sure as heck don't want to be sitting on my phone looking at slop when I could be forming real connections, doing real work, making real change, or at least genuinely enjoying a book, hobby, or even just some form of self reflection. 

 

There is one less diver in the septic tank. 

 

Roland 

 

 

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