I looked at Facebook this morning, which is now something I only do once or twice a week. (I almost always check it on Sundays.) There was a post from an old high school acquaintance announcing his intention to leave Facebook, and essentially all social media. There was a point, I can’t remember exactly when, where a lot of my old high school acquaintances got on Facebook and started sending friend requests to each other. I went from not having any contact with anyone I knew in high school to suddenly being able to chat with 20 or 30 of them, and having a bit of a view into their current lives. It was fun and interesting. It only led to two real-world meetups, I think, but those were both nice, and wouldn’t have happened without Facebook.
Anyway, that friend’s post, and the presidential inauguration tomorrow, got me thinking again about how I’m engaging with social media and consuming general media, and what changes I should make, if any. So this post is going to be a (probably lengthy) rumination on that. I’ll try to make it a bulleted list, and see how that goes.
- Facebook: I’d like to delete my Facebook account, but there’s still enough useful and fun stuff there that I feel like I shouldn’t. I only check it occasionally, at this point, and I try to stick to the reverse chronological feed, which they’ve made harder to access, but it’s still there. I don’t use the iOS app at all (which is one of the reasons I don’t check it often). I only use it from Firefox, with maximum ad-blocking.
- Twitter/X: I still have an account there, but I’ve set it to private and don’t post there anymore. I still need to look at stuff there occasionally, if there’s a person or company that still has an account there, and they use it to post product updates or stuff like that.
- Threads: I was curious about whether or not Threads would become a serious Twitter replacement at one point, and it was an interesting service at the start, but I’m not finding much use for it now. Most of the folks who went from Twitter to Threads, back when Bluesky was invitation-only, have now moved to Bluesky. So I still have an account, but I’m not using it much.
- Instagram: I’ve had an Instagram account for a long time, but never really used it much. I’m actually checking it more often now, and have followed a bunch of accounts there. But it’s still mostly useless. It’s just that are some people/businesses who only post on Instagram, or primarily there, so I feel like I need to keep an account. And it’s a good place to get some random comics stuff, like the New Yorker cartoons.
- Meta in general: Zuckerburg is not a good guy, so yeah, I’d like to drop off of Facebook, Threads, and Instagram. But they have just enough utility that I feel like I need to stay on them, to some extent.
- Bluesky: I wish I could have gotten on Bluesky earlier, but I had to wait for the invitation-only period to end. If I could have gotten on earlier, I (and I suspect a lot of other folks) would have skipped Threads and some of the other niche platforms that were out there, and the mass Twitter exodus would have been bigger and more orderly. Well, anyway, at this point, Bluesky is a pretty OK place to be. I check it daily, I guess, and post there occasionally. I don’t have a lot of “real” friends there, but a lot of the people and companies I used to follow on Twitter are on Bluesky now. I’m a little worried about what the long-term plan is for Bluesky though. Right now, it’s ad-free and the default timeline is reverse chronological, but they’re going to have to find a way to make money, eventually.
- Mastodon: I really wish more folks had come over to Mastodon. I still love it, and there are some great people there. But there aren’t a lot of mainstream folks or companies that have active accounts there. For an iOS client, I’m still using Toot!, though I feel like it’s probably time to check out some others. At some point, I’m hoping someone will create a good client that aggregates Mastodon, Bluesky, and maybe general RSS. I think there are probably folks working on that, and maybe there’s already a good one out there, but I haven’t found it yet.
- RSS: Every once in a while, I try to embrace RSS. I stick with it for a while, then drift away. I’m still paying for an account with The Old Reader, and using that as my main RSS back-end. And I use it as the front-end when I’m checking RSS via the web. On iOS, I use Reeder as a front-end. I’m still using the previous version of Reeder. The newest version seems to be trying for that consolidated view that I’d like, if it could include RSS, Mastodon, and Bluesky, at least. But I’d also want it to have web-based view, and not just iOS and macOS apps, so I could use it on PC.
Well, that was an excessively long and rambling list of social media thoughts. Now let’s move on to more general media.
- Newspapers: I still pay for the New York Times and the Washington Post, though I did the little dance a while ago where I threatened to cancel and they gave me lower rates for a year. So I’ll reevaluate those after those discounts expire. Both papers have their problems, but they’re both still better than most of the alternatives.
- PBS: I still get my NJ news from our local NJ PBS station and their NJ Spotlight News program. And I support them with a monthly donation, though it’s honestly a small one. The donation gets me access to PBS Passport, which I use frequently to watch various shows, usually in the mystery or police procedural genre, and usually British.
- NPR: I listen to WNYC in New York and WXPN in Philly. I don’t currently give to either of them, but I’m thinking about it. (I’ve given them both one-time donations in the past, multiple times, but not recently.) The NPR Plus thing might be worth doing. I should consider getting more of my news from NPR, I think.
- YouTube TV: I’m still paying for YouTube TV, though I’m struggling with that. It’s useful for watching local news, baseball, football, and stuff like that. But I kinda lost interest in football this year, since the Giants did so poorly. At this point, I’m mostly using it to watch TCM, which is great, but maybe not worth $83/month, which is what they just raised the price to. (And of course it bothers me that $1 or $2 of that $83 is going to support Fox News.)
Whew. I could go on, but I’m pretty sure nobody wants me to. The world is full of billionaires who, more and more, exert control and influence on social media, news media, and entertainment media. It’s worth spending some time evaluating how you use this stuff, how you engage with it, and how you pay for it. I want to be an informed and responsible citizen. I want to keep in touch with friends and relatives. And I want to do so without funneling too much money into the pockets of certain billionaires. I hope I’m striking a reasonable balance here, without agonizing too much about it all.