Name it. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Discord, Mastodon, Bluesky, TikTok or else. Which ones do you have? Why do you have them? What do you do in them?

Something interesting to note down, is that all of these one I’ve mentioned are extremely popular. Is it all greatness or it’s just me not able to notice it? During my lifetime so far, I’ve never been inclined to any of them. To be real, I cannot say I never touched any social media platform. I actually had my Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and more, but… this was about four or more years ago. Recently to last year I tried other social media platforms such as Mastodon and Bluesky. However, I do not have any account to any of such mentioned ones, currently.

Having any of those, perhaps, can be great to show yourself to the world. To bring your ideas to the world. To should your work, become an influencer, to post memes or anything else that could come at your mind. Just yesterday I was visiting some profiles from relevant people to me, and I got surprised on how they use to use it. Mainly to post some random phrases, auto promotion or events. Nothing really useful at all! And I’m telling that, because at my time at Mastodon I was doing exactly the same thing.

In the last year, I’ve quit many online services altogether in a movement of reducing my footprint and necessity to control and monitor my accounts. So this means four things:

1. I have an increased privacy online.
2. I have better protection against breaches.
3. I have less stuff to think about.
4. I have extra free time.

And, oh ho, what did I get by doing that? Think of having a day like this:

• No need to check on one or how many social media apps a living being could have.
• Don’t waste my time on shorts or TikTok.
• No useless emails or notifications.

How many hours have been saved just in these lines? I barely used social media throughout my life, so I don’t see like a great improvement (let’s put it as about 20 minutes), but it may be for others.

But these perks comes with a trade-off. For me, the most important one is: I cannot use of such services to reach more people.

I’m a programming hobbist and technology enthusiast. I do love to write CLI scripts and programs, and, of course, to write on this blog. Who wouldn’t want to get some feedback? As I mentioned before, I was also using Mastodon for auto promotion, and it didn’t made me famous, let’s get real, but I surely got some extra visibility. I did that, because just making such open-source programs wasn’t enough.

I could use these high volume platforms such as Twitter to get more visibility, but what is the point? Just create an account, post random stuff and announce my new projects and blog posts? Really? Does all the cost to give my data to X, have another account, notifications or whatever else do they do with my data pays the price to get such visibility?

The reason why you would want to have a social media, is for the sole fact that us, human beings, require social interaction in some way. Nevertheless, it’s far away from being the only way.

I’m totally fine to keep all my thoughts isolated in a unique place where I have more control, and I choose what to display on the blog to you. But, in the end, it’s my place and not someone’s else, that gives such a courtesy to allow me in, and guarantee their right to banish me.

Own your data. Embrace control.

This post is licensed under CC BY 4.0 by the author.