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sudo wrote

Start using social media platforms like Diaspora and Mastodon exclusively. This will force your friends to use those, too, if they want to communicate with you. When they inevitable ask you, "Why can't you use Facebook/Twitter like a normal person? Why do you have to be so difficult?" Tell them about how Facebook/Twitter don't respect your privacy, and how you value your privacy, and they should value their privacy, too. The main problem with these replacement social networks is the network effect - they aren't useful if nobody uses them. If you can make your friends set up accounts on these networks, there will be more people on them, even if they only use it to communicate with you. Plus, you might convince a few of them that privacy is important, and they'll switch over entirely, and continue the chain with their friends.

Here's a copypasta I created about the importance of privacy:


The problem with Facebook is that it doesn't respect your privacy. It tracks everything you read, like, and share, to try to learn as much about you as possible, in order to show you targeted advertisements. "So what?" you say. "I don't care if Facebook knows who I am." Think of it this way: the more you use Facebook, the more accurate their dossier of you becomes. Not only will they know things like your birthday and phone number; they'll know your personality, your opinions, and everything you've ever said on Facebook; even your private conversations with other people. And it never forgets. Facebook may know more about you than your parents do - in fact, they may know you even better than you know yourself.

Are you comfortable with an extremely detailed dossier of you just floating around somewhere out there? Even if it's only used to target you for advertising, there are still potential problems with it. For example, what would happen if there was a data breach, and your dossier was leaked to the public? It would be like being doxxed, but worse, because of how much information they have about you. All your personal, intimate, possibly embarrassing conversations would be open for anyone to see. All of your personal information, like your phone number, email address, street address, and other things would be leaked, too. With an enormous piece of software like Facebook, it's practically impossible to review every piece of it, to make sure it can't be hacked (and even if they did, there's still the possibility of a data breach via social engineering - tricking an employee into giving out sensitive data that they have access to).

Or, what if, someday in the future, the government becomes totalitarian, and they decide they want you to disappear? If they know you use Facebook, they could order Facebook to turn over all their information on you. Now, the government doesn't have to go digging up information about you, since Facebook has done all the hard work for them. Even if Facebook doesn't have bad intentions by collecting all this personal information, there are just too many plausible scenarios where it could be used against you to justify the existence of their dossier collection. Plus, even if you're a nobody, and you wouldn't care if a bunch of your personal information were leaked; you would have to be sure that you don't care now, and never will in the future. The best way to avoid Facebook breaching your privacy is to not give them any of your personal information in the first place, and the only way to do that is not to use it at all.


I'm aware that the part about the government going totalitarian sounds liberal - I wrote this with liberals in mind. They don't understand that the government is already against them, and explaining all of that here would be too long, and off-topic (and, if they don't agree, that might invalidate the rest of the argument, in their mind).

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GrimWillow wrote (edited )

I've had the idea to throw a party themed around switching services. Kind of like those super corporate "rubix cube parties" or costume parties. Maybe it could even be a costume party where everyone dresses up like an ice age animal to switch to Mastadon...I dunno. Imagine the reaction if liberals figure out that their party to switch from shitbook gets throttled.

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tnstaec wrote

I dunno what a Rubix cube party is, but I like this idea.

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GrimWillow wrote

Maybe I should have chosen a less corporate example, but I had chosen it because it had been organized from a workplace community I had once been a part of so I thought of it first. I just looked it up, and maybe the example I made is actually not as popular as I had assumed. I mostly see some sort of clothing swap costume party, but it was basically a party where everybody would learn and teach the trick to solving a rubix cube.

I never went to it, but co-workers kept talking about how fun and interesting it was as a party theme. It made me think that if people were willing to learn something as stupid, but slightly complicated, as that at a party together, then surely we could do something more useful or interesting as a party theme.

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noticeweird wrote

Help others set up their own versions of the services. It's getting really easy with nothing more than a raspberry pi.

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