This is not an April Fool’s post. I did an April Fool’s post, it’s over here, but this post is not one.

The people who follow me on Facebook, as well as within the Reality Fragments Group, know about the troubles I’ve had with account restrictions. I had just gotten off one restriction for reasons never disclosed to me, when a few days later I got restricted again, and again, for no reasons given.

This reminded me of how I had to not post about things related to Ukraine, where a Ukrainian tractor pulling the Moscow was flagged as fake news when it was clearly satire. While I do support the Palestinian civilians, I hadn’t really posted anything in support of Palestine (I learned my lesson about Ukraine), so I don’t think the accusation that Meta is blocking pro-Palestinian content fits my particular situation¹.

I looked over things and had no clue. Facebook dutifully told me something about the Community Standards and suggested I read it, but there was no reason given, no posts pointed to, nothing. Again. At least when I got put in ‘Facebook Jail’ for posting an image of a Ukrainian tractor pulling the Moscow, they gave me reasoning of it being fake news. Satire is not news, fake or otherwise.

So I thought to myself, “Why am I on Facebook?” I had reasons long ago. I even had reasons not-so-long-ago. But what are my reasons now? I did an inventory. Facebook gave me no reasons. Sure, you can talk about the value of the community, but Facebook algorithms don’t really let me see people’s posts as I would like, and I have too many friends, relatives and acquaintances to go to each page daily.

In a way, Facebook shadow bans people. You have to pay to place content. Google does something similar, but people with some understanding look beyond the first few search results and even the first page.

The Decision

This problem I saw was a part of a storm of problems I have been seeing lately. You see, all I really want to do is write and get enough to live off of and maybe put something in the bank for ‘rainy days’. It’s not that complex of a goal. People have told me all of my life I should write, so here I am, scribbling away. I haven’t published the books I have wanted to yet, but yes, here I am, writing, and part of that writing is research – even for, and especially for, fiction. Fiction has to make sense, reality does not².

First, generative AI came out and I had to look at how well it wrote – which isn’t really that great, but it gets it’s writing ability from analyzing popular stuff, so in time it should catch up with your local tabloid and perhaps even surpass it. It even has the capacity to become better than your local tabloid, and can regurgitate facts, so it will do some popular writing and maybe even do it well – but – it doesn’t have the capacity to be human, and it never will.

Marketing has already got it spamming Amazon.com with eBooks, and Facebook has plenty of advertising about selling generated content. I even saw advertising on Facebook for generated content that passes AI detection, which is a great way to get money from people who aren’t actually creating anything of value but instead overtaking the web with generated content, a further step down from the marketed Internet as it is³.

I started a Facebook group as a way to get people to interact with my content because WordPress.com sort of sucks at that with the separate logins. That wasn’t working out too well, and instead just became a handful of people who I knew pretty well but never shared anything I wrote with their friends, as if I were some sort of secret that they kept to themselves – but the Facebook algorithms shadow ban anyone who doesn’t pay. I did promote a few posts in the past, but it just made no sense and wasn’t cost effective for me.

Factor in that WordPress.com and Tumblr, where my sites presently reside, volunteered users and then told how not to volunteer selling blogs and perhaps even personal information for AI training. I wrote about what you can do about that, but really, the trust has been eroded there. As someone who pays for hosting, it’s injurious insult and insulting injury at the same time.

It seemed like everyone had building walls to box me in – reminiscent of the Cavafy poem, ‘Walls’:

Without reflection, without mercy, without shame,
they built strong walls and high, and compassed me about.

And here I sit now and consider and despair.

It wears away my heart and brain, this evil fate:
I had outside so many things to terminate.

Oh! why when they were building could I not beware!

But never a sound of building, never an echo came.
Insensibly they drew the world and shut me out. 

C.P. Cavafy, “Walls”

The trouble is that I’m not very good at despair. People have moved my cheese before. When there is no clear path, you think like a burglar or a man with a sledgehammer.

The decision became easy once I took it all in within my broader context. My Facebook use would become passive, a placeholder. I’ll check in on it now and then, but there’s no real reason to be there training Meta’s AI on how to fleece users of their digital shadows. I’ll just not play their game because I don’t like their prizes.

But It Doesn’t End There.

While backing up some things to my Google Drive, I ran across something interesting when I was giving the appropriate permissions. Below should show up for you if you get to the link:

https://accountscenter.facebook.com/info_and_permissions.

My activities off Meta technologies? Well, who has been sharing data with Meta as part of their business analytics? It ends up it was a pretty exhaustive list.

I was doing them one by one when I found the way to do it en masse. Pictured, you can see part of the 263 websites that were apparently reporting to Meta about stuff, which was closer to 300 before I started counting. I’d say maybe 280 or so, but I don’t know, I was in a rhythm.

I disconnected them all.

The only thing that’s happening now to Facebook is updating the RealityFragments page, which presently happens automatically because of settings on Facebook and even that may end soon as I think that through. After all, I noticed that the updates hadn’t been happening automatically for some time.

In the end, I’ve found Facebook not worth it and I was only continuing out of habit. It certainly took more information from me than I like, and it gave me little in return.

So What Social Network Will I Use?

One person suggested Mastodon. Mastodon, when I did try to use it a few times, made me feel like I was attempting to ‘shag an unwilling Octopus’. LinkedIn was also suggested, but the joke I have heard from people way too many times is, “You still use LinkedIn?”.

Twitter has been Musked, and I never really liked it anyways – it has always been cliquish, and as unfriendly as it is now though with more oversight and less Musk.

I’ll look things over as time permits, but my focus now is on writing – not handing people my data so that they can make money. To be fair, Mastodon has the most promise on paper, but my experience with trying to set that up last year did not make me think highly of it – and I’ve compiled my own Linux kernels. Maybe that has changed.

I know that I’ve changed. I know that people can find my content through search engines – where most visitors come from for me – and if they want to share it, they can. I’m tired of caring about that.

And for those of you blogging, here’s a bonus link worth reading: WordPress Wants to Turn My Old Blog Into an AI Zombie, and It Breaks My Heart.

1. I like the idea of peace, but history teaches us that if you too publicly espouse peace, someone finds a way to kill you. ↩︎
2. “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.” – Mark Twain ↩︎
3. The original intentions of people who created the Internet was not to make money, but hey, now everyone wants to make money for nothing. ↩︎