I've been using Mastodon for some years now and I can't praise it enough. I believe mainstream social media has become a cancer on our society, but not because being social is inherently bad, but because people have allowed themselves to be herded into social spaces controlled by for-profit comp...
I started using Discord in early 2019 mainly because most of my gaming friends were already using it and quickly recognized it as a fantastic platform for collaboration. I started to write about using it for organizing a project and never finished that post. I ended up creating and maintaining a...
Now that baconreader no longer works on reddit due to steep price hikes for third party apps to use reddit's API, I have deleted my 11 year old account there. I did not typically read the site in a browser and I hated the official reddit app so if baconreader won't work anymore I won't be usin...
note: this post was never finished and was never made live in 2019. I had intended to add some screenshots showing how I set up various servers, documenting permissions settings and describe all the servers I was running but just got bored and didn't finish it. Since I deleted my account this w...
When I first set up a twitter account sometime in 2007 I did it just because it was the new thing and I wanted to ensure that I secured my "twitter handle". I never posted anything on it, and then forgot about it. Sometime in 2011 I was having a discussion with my office mate about the service and...
Back in 2010 when I deleted my Facebook account it was mainly because I didn't like the way the company was constantly changing their policies and privacy settings. Things I knew I had turned off would be mysteriously turned on again, and they were manipulating how I saw the content posted by u...
One of the founding members of Facebook is saying everything I said about it when I quit using it. Social media is programming you and destroying civil society.
Former Facebook exec says social media is ripping apart society
No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth.
h...
Theres been a lot of talk on G+ lately about Google's supposed ban on "fake accounts". Anecdotal evidence of otherwise worthy folk who have gotten their free Google+ accounts shut down for violating the terms of service which disallows participation using a false identity have raised the ire of man...
If the quality of the conversation that takes place in the comments to stories you find on the web are any measure of the quality of the content to which they are attached, I would advise you not to read stories posted on CNN or FOX News. Both of these sites serve as outlets for the most sensationa...
Hardly surprising, but I thought this article [link dead 2024] (see the archived version) by Stewart Meagher summarized one researcher's findings about Facebook's tracking methods and explained the methodology so well that it was worth posting a link to it.
By now everyone and their Grandmot...
Running a blog is very different from writing in a paper-based journal. You don't need to know anything about servers, domains, hosting companies, DNS, php, databases, html, sftp, site security, interface design, web design, graphic design, operating systems or really anything much more technical...
I'm starting to hate social networking websites in general. I enjoy using my computer a lot more when I'm the one deciding what to do with it without the constant unsolicited advice about what I should be reading or investigating from all of my "friends". Unsolicited messages are called spam when t...
Just a short note to my military friends. Doubtless you'll be hearing about this soon enough anyway, but just in case you do not: Tom Ryan is due to present a talk at the upcoming Black Hat Conference in Las Vegas about the dangers of revealing too much information on social networking sites.
...It took me over an hour but I finally managed to manually remove every last photo, video, like, group, note, friend, list, and event from my facebook account. However, the experience was pretty liberating. I also remembered to change my password before deactivating so I wouldn't accidentally log i...
So for those of you who aren't using Buzz (yet?) and in an attempt to keep stuff I write about in one place, I gathered up some of the posts I've made on Buzz for this story. I don't know if I'll keep using Buzz or not, and if I don't I'd like to have a copy of this stuff somewhere. I use my per...
OK so what Facebook DIDNT tell you about thir new privacy settings thing is that they have made a deal to sell all the information you have marked as public to the Google and Microsoft Bing search engines. That's right! Unless you're careful, everything you have ever posted on Facebook may soon ge...
So for a while in 2006 I had a myspace page. I saved a bunch of the stories about myspace that I had posted there and maybe I'll link them here one day. I've since deleted my account, and I only realize now that I never took a screen shot of it (I like to keep stuff like that) so I can't post t...
What a joke this site is. For one thing it's slow as hell, and for another - while most people are happily scrolling through the mass of flashy animated gifs and sexy advertisements blithely, I am bumping up against bad code and non-standards compliant CSS which doesn't render properly in a real we...
