🔥Changing social media accounts is easier if you realize platforms are meant to burn. 🔥
🔥 Hot flashes for tech, if you will. 🔥
I’m finally at that point. I can no longer be on many social media platforms. If you don’t know why or want to argue about that, just move along. I’m not interested in talking to you, really. I’m merely outlining what I’ve done and where I’m going to help others do it, too. Because the more people who can also move do so, the bigger a statement it will be.
It is a huge pain in the ass, though, I’m not going to lie.
Twitter is probably the easiest, and honestly, the first I did after it was bought by the South African billionaire. I downloaded my data, deleted my tweets, and then torpedoed the account. Rinse and repeated for the many (and yeah, I had too many) accounts that I had held onto over the years. @ChicagoBites was probably my biggest — I had built that sucker up to support my then podcast and then slowly let it drift down into quietude after the podcast and the site had stopped. Good times, really. I built a lovely community there over the years and it even helped me land a few jobs. A few people chased me over to Facebook and Instagram, but it was never the same. I recently replaced this social void with Bluesky and it reminds me of the Twitter early days before enshitification and right-wing asshatery took hold. I can recommend Bluesky for the moment.
Goodreads – I downloaded my data – yes, kids, always download your data! I can’t trust my digital footprint to remain in the cloud forever and ever. You shouldn’t either, not ever. I maintain local copies of everything because I’ve seen too much and I’m right to be paranoid. Anyway, I ported my read list from here to Storygraph which, for the moment, is not owned by a corporation and seems to be a very nice sort of book management site. It lacks the social flair of Goodreads, but let’s be honest — Goodreads was really a garbage site. It was. No updates since the dawn of whatever. I’m posting my read books on Bluesky, and that’s given me better engagement on my reviews anyway.
WhatsApp & FB Messenger – I’m not quite there yet. I have a few stragglers that I do want to push over into Signal or Telegram before I cut the cord. These alternative messaging services are more secure (nothing is 100%). But I do have everything downloaded (that word again!), and local copies on my back-up drive.
Instagram – I went through and deleted everything and then made them private. I have two accounts, and these will each be deleted with Facebook when that goes. Other pictures? I’d torpedoed Flickr years ago and have only inadvertently uploaded a handful of pictures to Google Cloud. I’m pretty set. All my pictures are on my computer and two external hard-drives. Storage is cheap and I know my stuff isn’t being fed to some hot-garbage AI.
Spotify – Did you know you can port your playlists to other services? I moved from Spotify a while back because some of the right-wing podcasters they were pushing were truly offensive. Anyway, that’s all gone and scrubbed. If I want to listen to something there’s always Youtube (search history off!) or flipping through the CDs (keep your media, kids!).
Amazon Lists – you thought I’d forgotten about these! Nope, I’m scrubbing these, too. I had a list that was just books my library didn’t have. I manually added these books to Storygraph, and then deleted the list. Colossal pain in the ass. At one point, I also used Amazon to track books I was reading, so that had to go, too. I think I’m going to just use Amazon as a catalog and buy anything I need as locally or small-business-y as possible. Costco, for the moment, is not evil and will use that as an alternative for household stuff.
Facebook – honestly, I was never that into Facebook. I’ve been going through and snagging photos and deleting posts, though. I should be good to tank this within the week. Instagram and Whatsapp will go with it. Adios.
In sum, social media and online services are ALL temporary and should be treated as such. If you’re not the customer, you are the product. Never forget.
