Social media is the biggest con-trick played on the human race since organised religion.
It's gone beyond just writing on walls and worshipping cats, now it's like a proper highly organised mega-cult. It purports to inform us about stuff whilst feeding us disinformation. It involves massive peer pressure about how we should react to stuff if we don't want to be ostracised by our friends or trolled to hell by people who believe in the efficacy of tin foil hats but not vaccines. It claims to be virtually omnipresent and the people promoting it make it sound omnipotent...
Frankly, the only difference between this sociopathic media and a religious cult is Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk definitely exist. It's not "social" media, it's sociopathic media.
Telling Facebook what sort of films you like, or what sort of music or food you like, is like walking into McDonald's and saying "Hi, I'd like to become a big mac and fries please"! It's like admitting that your idea of a nice day is being taken into the "back room", diced, minced up, reshaped, cooked alive, and served up as 4 ounce pattie of advertising leads, sandwiched in freshly baked bun of demographic data to whoever will bid the most for you. They will eat you, digest you, consume every last ounce of what makes you tick in order to sell you stuff you don't need, and then they'll shit you out.
So allowing farcebook to access the contacts in your phone is like saying "I'd like to sell out all my friends to a faceless, heartless mega corporation that's gonna strip mine their lives and exploit the fuck out of them". Nice way to treat your friends.
Platforms like Facebook and X/twitter are designed to exploit rather than empower. They turn every swipe, click, and post into a data point for the advertising machine. They created echo chambers where the loudest, angriest voices dominate, leaving little or no room for meaningful dialogue. What started as a promise to connect us has left us feeling more disconnected than ever, and yet, for many, so dependent on our abusers for our daily fix.
But here’s the thing: we don’t have to accept this. We don’t have to keep feeding the beast. We can break the habit. Thankfully there are spaces emerging where the rules are different, where the users hold the power rather than the corporate abusers.
Enter Bluesky. It’s not perfect (and likely never will be), but it feels like stepping out of a vile toxic swamp and breathing some fresh air. Like escaping the fetid stench of an overcrowded cell and smelling the coffee. Bluesky flips the script: instead of harvesting your data for ad dollars, it prioritizes decentralization and transparency. Instead of trapping you in a walled garden, it gives you tools to customize your experience and even build your own space. Bluesky is built on the idea that you should own your online identity. Your data isn’t for sale, and your connections are yours to keep, not their’s to control. In fact if you don't like Bluesky, you can migrate to another platform using the same open-source protocols and take your identity with you; user name, friends / followers, posts, account data, the whole shebang. Fuck you Muskberg. It’s like reclaiming a piece of the internet from before it was colonized by the 21st century techbros. You can even control who's shit you see on your timeline (unless you choose otherwise). So instead of being subjected to rage-fueled algorithms, you get actual communities where actual conversations can happen. It feels like an antidote to the digital rat race.
If you’re as sick as I am of the enshittification* of your digital life, why not try something different? Bluesky is still growing, still evolving, but that’s part of its charm. It’s not another troll infested cult, it’s a community in the making. Come join us on Bluesky and help define what truly "social" media could be and hopefully will be.
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