If you've been considering deleting your social media accounts, now is probably an excellent time.

Lemmy is the only social media I have at this point

Same. I've returned to things like IRC for my online social time.
- XMPP/Matrix for me, I like my, interoperability and E2EE.
  
  Well, that the usual spying messaging service I need for family members, fellow tenants and coworkers...
- Isn't that shit still sent in plaintext and permanently logged for all to see?
- YES IRC!!
- Man... efnet, Undernet and Dalnet running scrollz brings back memories.
I consider it more as pseudonymous forums than social media.
- That's fair. I just think of it as social media because we are interacting with other people when it's not bots posting
What about LinkedIn? Is people jumping out of it?
- Oh right, I don't use it as social media but solely for job hunting.
  
  The fact I haven't touched it in a while means I'm at a comfortable spot, job-wise.

What? Because of the elections? I feel like it's always been an excellent time to delete social media accounts haha

I don't disagree, I'm just saying if anyone was on the fence and needed a push.
- This guys over here pushing people off of fences! Must be a descendant of the guy who murdered Humpdy-Dumpdy.
  
  What? The nursery rhyme said he had a great fall. It never specified what CAUSED his fall!
  
  Yes. I AM in here spouting off nursery rhyme conspiracy theories. I figure the next 4 years don't matter. So I'm just going to forget any sense of self control, rational thinking, or empathatic morals. I'm just going to poop in the streets and blame.....eh, who can I blame......I'll blame Andy Dick. Seems like something he'd do. Nobody is going to question that!
- I actually disagree with both being on social media, and leaving, so I'm choosing the third option of joining a fake social media website that doesn't actually connect you to anyone else, but it has all the features I would want if it did.

I was answering a technical question on Reddit last night when I realized that, while it might help the person asking it, I am also fueling Reddits profits, training AI, and supporting a big American corporation by providing free knowledge.

So I reconsidered and I deleted the answer I was writing.

I will use my reddit account read only from now. No more upvotes, no more downvotes, no more comments. AdBlock enabled using Firefox for all sites. I already use Linux instead of Microsoft. I don't have Facebook or Instagram. I de-googled my online accounts and e-mail and moved my domains and e-mail to a Swiss company. I drive German cars. I will consciously start vetting my purchases to be not from the US or China. I will buy local as much as I can. When I build software, I will not host it on Google or azure or aws. I'm looking at nextcloud for my next pet project.

The list is growing, and every little item I can add to it gives me a little more satisfaction and peace of mind.

There's also an extension which always redirects you to old.reddit.con too as an extra fuck you to their shitty UI. I think it's literally called "Old Reddit Redirect" or something
- I use tampermonkey with the old reddit redirect script

I've been wondering something, specifically related to something I heard mentioned last night on a stream: their hypothesis was that real life ground game, door knocking or whatever, doesn't matter any more, and the modern 'ground game' is social media and 1:1 conversations.

When 'reasonable' people delete/deleted twitter/facebook in droves, are we just ceding the ground game to the racists and the ones who can shout the most hate?

When 'reasonable' people delete/deleted twitter/facebook in droves, are we just ceding the ground game to the racists and the ones who can shout the most hate?

Leaving a toxic environment that also is a privacy and advertising nightmare will always be an excellent personal choice.
- The point being, an excellent personal choice at the expense of the greater whole?
- leaves Earth
  
  Gooood byeeeeeeeeeeeee
are we just ceding

it was a noble effort, but that battle is lost. at this point you're just making yourself a target. not that social medias won't relinquish your data to the gestapo the instant it's demanded. which they probably did years ago
- Yep, everything outing yourself as LGBTQ+ or an ally, or liberal/progressive/democrat will turn into your lynching material. Time to delete everything and be prepared for The Handmaiden’s Tale to kick up real quick.
I still somewhat cling to this same belief although I think it's a futile effort as you're not just competing against randos online, but networks of bots, disinformation campaigns, state actors, and an army of gullible individuals who parrot their rhetoric. You just can't compete against that as a single person.
They have the financial motivation of stealing Social Security money. You do not. They can and will make an echo chamber. You will not. The Billionaires know the working class are coming for them and they are terrified.

I also went into NextDNS and put blocks on the news sites I got into the habit of checking. Fuck this, I’m not even in the US.

back to the basics.

What if I were considering deleting my conciousness for the next 4 years? I genuinely feel like I would be happier in a coma for the next 4 years.

I'm not joking. Let's do this.

Volunteer overseas for the next 4 years. Teach English or something.
- Me fail english? That's unpossible!
- I was seriously considering joining the French Foreign Legion, until I learned I was too old for them. Ugh.

I deleted them all back around 2015. Only use this, and not seriously.

1000%

Here in Lemmy using Sync, one can filter words from headers and content. I sanitized my time-line and I'm just gliding through.

Yep, and having used sync for over a decade makes me not miss reddit at all. It looks nearly identical anyway, I never used either website unless for the initial signup.

The problem is beyond social media accounts. Modern life makes us to have digital things, "apps". As much as I'd benefit from it (I'm a programmer), I can't help but recognize how dangerous is this digital dependence and requirement. Not only our entire lives become bits and bytes across gazillions of platforms, they're out of our real control: from advertising platforms to hackers, the online information kind of awaits to fall on third-party hands.

How many of our information is now inside the training data from major AI models (as much as I like some aspects of AIs, that's a fact), such as GPT-4, Claude Somnet and, especially, Google's Gemini, whose company is responsible for more than 90% of the search engine market while also responsible for our smartphones' brains, not just Android but things embedded on Apple's ecosystems as well?

But people only notice how far our digital footprint goes when there's some serious thing such as the risk of persecution from the government. People decide to delete their accounts hoping that it'll lead to their data being magically erased and, as a programmer, I say: no, our data remains, there's no DELETE * FROM users WHERE id = your_id, there's actually a UPDATE users SET deleted=CURRENT_TIME() WHERE id = your_id that's not the same thing (it just marks your account as deleted, but all the data remains for whatever time period they wish, not even mentioning periodic database backups that'll preserve your data in the hands of that platform)... not even mentioning how your data could've already been assimilated through platform integrations (API) by third-party partners such as advertisers. There's no way to force the erasure.

Yeah, there's the law such as GDPR's "Right to be forgotten", but there's a Brazilian saying "O que os olhos não veem o coração não sente" (What the eyes can't see, the heart can't feel). A platform can "confirm the account deletion" but they can keep the data without anyone's knowledge. It's worse: there are laws that require the companies to keep the data for some time (here in Brazil, for example, companies need to keep data for five years, because the justice could need the data in order to solve some investigation).

So, I don't like to be a harbinger of doom, but our digital traces will never actually entirely disappear from the Internet.. especially if you guys are thinking of avoiding the incoming persecution from a new government. Online data remains as far as we couldn't tell. And this includes way beyond social media platforms: it also includes your apps such as, I dunno, your Starbucks accounts? Your Amazon accounts? Everything is data that can be analyzed among a big data and traced back to each one's preferences, including political preferences... I'm sorry to say that, but I need to transmit this knowledge as a developer.

The GDPR penalties are pretty serious for any reasonably large entity operating within Europe. I think when they're actually pushed with a proper GDPR request, they will mostly comply.

And it's risky to try to use that data. If someone, sometime in the future can prove their data was used after a confirmed GDPR request, it could be bad for them. And frankly, the number of actual GDPR requests is small enough that it's not worth their while for such a small part of the sheer cascade of data they have.

Yes, for everyone else I don't doubt they don't actually delete anything.
- The modern world runs on plausible deniability, especially the tech world

Facebook deleted in 2017 and Twitter months before it was bought by you know who. I don't miss either of them. I love how Lemmy isn't all spammy.

I'm stuck with Facebook because of Messenger, but I've deleted everything else

Delete that, too. It was the last stranglehold Facebook had on me, but I decided to get rid of it, let friends/family know how they could contact me instead, and hell, most of them ended up following me to Signal (or just plain ol' Discord) anyways.

Way ahead of you. I deleted all my social media last decade and never went back. Hardly used it to begin with

I'm not on Lemmy
- This is not social. It's antisocial!

How so?