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.
How so?
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…
YES IRC!!
Isn’t that shit still sent in plaintext and permanently logged for all to see?
That’s why you use pseudonyms and hide your power level. However, the experience is what I’m after.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe by default IRC is only logged if the client opts to log it. I don’t remember being able to see message history when joining a channel back in the day, so I’m not sure if servers themselves keep logs by default.
How does one get on irc and are there specific rooms that are good? Hope that question makes sense. I ar tek dumb.
You need to download a client, and then you connect to a server. Once on a server, you can join (and create) channels.
https://www.irchelp.org/faq/irctutorial.html
As far as servers go, I personally enjoy tilde.chat and libera.chat
so (and this may have changed, i used to go on irc mainly in the fuckin 90s) but you need a client, back in the day the big ones were mIRC and pIRCh. i am an mIRC loyalist myself.
it comes with a server list, you just double click on a server and itll connect you. then if you type /list it will list all the channels (rooms). you can see how many people are in each channel, and you can double click on the channel list to join one. then type away
Everything publicly put on the internet is permanently logged if someone decides to log it, that applies to every modern website or chat software.
Yes but I’m pretty sure it’s a lot easier with irc. Like you can just view perma logs for irc servers. Not as easily digested as say something like this. Maybe I’m explaining it poorly.
To collect logs for an IRC server you need to set up a client that will always be on and connected, otherwise you will only have logs from when you had the program turned on. You can’t view logs from before you were doing that, unless someone else shares them with you. IRC servers don’t publish their internal logs normally.
Are there people lurking IRC just collecting logs, sure. But that also goes for everything else. If you delete this comment, there are people out there who will still have a copy, it’s not that hard. It will likely be on Internet Archive too.
But I wrote I DO NOT GIVE FACEBOOK PERMISSION in big letters and everything!
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
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 aUPDATE users SET deleted=CURRENT_TIME() WHERE id = your_idthat’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
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
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?
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
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.
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?
I believe having a good, healthy personal foundation allows people to make better choices for their communities.
It isn’t worth it. At least for me at this point. When you are dealing with the ineptitude of the simple-minded masses—which is either bandied at best or they are totally blinded by hatred from vacuuming up disinformation without an iota of effort to fact-check anything—the best hope is face-to-face discourse. But even then you are unlikely to change most peoples’ minds that they have been deluded and taken for a ride—especially the older they are. Which is sad and frankly disturbing. One of the most disgusting things to me is a myopic person who is so intransigent, that they can’t for a moment believe they might be mistaken about something.
From looking at the line I was in voting, it’s no wonder this happened: these simple-minded geriatrics turned out in droves for their dictator.
GOP: Geriatrics for an Orwellian Power
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.
deleted by creator
Oh hey, I never thought I’d see somebody who’s the target audience for those AI generated social media sites in the wild :P
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.
1000%
