We have local community groups on FB. One for our hamlet of about 50 houses. Some households refuse to join as they don't do Facebook. I only do Facebook because of the local group. I long ago gave up trying to fill those people in. It is somewhat of a pain.
I have no idea what apps are sharing with what. On Android network access is so ambiguous. There's such fuzzy wording. Like when you are asked for location permission to use bluetooth. Even perms like file system access. I don't know what this extends to. Have no idea what it is doing. I recently set up a new ipad. I failed to even work out where Photos ended up. Couldn't work out what was backed up, and what wasn't. How to opt out of everything and opt in piecemeal. Whether the OS/gadget had AI enhancements, what they were or are, whether the apps would have cloud access or not. In fact for an apple device it bugged me with dialogs from the get go. And bluetooth kept turning itself back on. I would say I am technically savvy, but I was pretty clueless. I was quite keen to try out some of the AI photo tools. Like find pictures of such and such, but I didn't get that far as confusion abound.
I read an article that said something along the lines of people aren't prepared to pay for apps, so instead we get app store silo advert supported crap-ware. And if it's not the apps its click bait making fractional gains by being supported by ad networks. That some of, but not all of us recoil from.
I wouldn't say it's all trash, but I find TV like this. I loathe most of it finding it pretty vacuous. I am still drawn to it.
We had a defining realisation last year when we found a Youtube channel where a guy cleans carpets. I found it more nutritionally satisfying than 99% of programming on the TV. It was and is totally eye-opening. I have a similar draw to nature. I can watch wild animals doing their thing. And get some entertainment with curtain twitching. I think it's just that inherent human thing - watching.
I do like reading. The minutes I do this are ever dwindling through competition for my idle brain.
I was very late to the party getting a smartphone. Didn't stop me picking up my laptop repeatedly. Visiting the same old haunts.
I have yet to install Facebook or Whatsapp or similar. I think it would be the death of me. I spend way too much time on my phone/computer.
I was in a care giving role and felt it couldn't leave my side. Since losing that person, I now rejoice in being able to leave my phone. Heck I didn't turn it on yesterday. And it has been sitting in the kitchen all day today.
The telephone does fill me with existential dread as most communication with me is asking me for something or alerting me to something negative. Perhaps that's an age thing. Whereas the Internet is still pleasurable but a complete and utter time suck.
It's a false sense of urgency thing. The kids just grow calloused to it, culminating in e.g. completely ignoring the door bell.
I had a friend that decided to essentially go off the grid around 2000-2005, he's my age (gen-z), I remember him showing me a website he was developing with javascript and IE.
Now he's asking me to help with the Google Play / Mac App stuff because it makes no sense to him. It isn't an age thing.
In an age of smartphones, nobody would think of ringing my doorbell without texting first. Deliveries come with notifications. An unexpected door ring at this point is probably someone I don't want to bother dealing with like a salesperson.
That's obviously not what I meant. Communication on current social media has only led us into a new era of populism, and seems to only worsen political polarization. Unless something changes, I will continue to think it does more harm than good.
Self-hosting sounds good but the security concerns are just a bind. Plus you need stability. Like having a home. Our electric grid falls over at least once a week where we live. Yes I could use batteries, but no, I can't be bothered.
Batteries are a pretty set-and-forget solution though. Out of all the maintenance/thought I put towards my server, the UPS takes the least amount of attention. Though it really is only good for outages <2 or 3 hours. If it’s longer in your area, then it’s a bigger concern
I think I had a flagged post on Bluesky, early on that just referenced something elsewhere - it was pretty harmless. And I remember a few X users trying the platform saying something vaguely controversial and getting a suspension. Or some such. I don't want to get into the ins and outs of censorship and free speech but you can get booted out the pub for saying something disagreeable in front of the bar hands or patrons. And I would be quite livid if I had invested in a platform and then got shut down.
The AT protocol gives you the ability to produce feeds. But it's actually the consumption aggregation and discover-ability that seems to the difficult bit. I feel we need a lightweight RSS style reader in browser to really get past this. There are weird hacks on Bluesky to subscribe to feeds. But it is messy. The feeds are where the magic potentially happens.
Twitter had become unpalatable before Musk bought it. And there were various crisis of confidence and herd threatening migrations, but people just couldn't be bothered. In its latest ungodly form people are still sticking around, or moving to silos and bubbles on other platforms, it's just a complete and utter mess at this point.
Platforms inevitably win out with convenience. Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp succeeded as people just couldn't share or publish photos or files easily. Combined with some magic discover-ability.
Twitter's collapse has been painful. But weirdly it was incredibly influential though low in membership.
My personal consumption of social feeds has been obliterated to nearly zero. I'm not sure if that's good or bad. I published for myself rather than an audience and had used Twitter just because it was easy. I have a broken computer at the moment and my entire dev stack / environment is in chaos. And although I think the barriers to publishing and self hosting are low there are still inherent obstacles.
