Hey so. I have been increasingly struggling with existing on Facebook. I do not believe it is operating even remotely in the interests of human rights, democracy, or even global stability in mind. The recent whistleblowing reveals have underlined just exactly how profit-focused it is, at the expense of our future. I know many smart and kind people working inside FB to fix that, but I want to exist less inside of this until it gets fixed – or maybe simply destroyed. We’ll see.
I hope maybe some people will maybe at least partially follow me out. You don’t have to leave – I know I also have friends who I only keep up with in facebook – but maybe we can also find other, truer parts of ourselves outside of the world of corporate surveillance?
Did we used to have out there conversations in LiveJournal threads? Get into philosophical arguments on a certain web forum/BBS system our friends held together? Did we walk around staring at the sky and caring for each other on 9/11? Have we traveled together, fallen down mountains together, had a good meal, a good drink, or even just a long email/DM/SMS/ytalk chat/IRC convo/USENET fight/ or whatever was the right communication channel of the day?
If so, I would /love/ to spend more real time sharing what’s happening with my life and learning about yours. This is an experiment to be both more social, and less on “social media”. I have created a personal and private account in what’s called Mastodon. It’s a federated, mostly-volunteer-led, decentralized social media/microblogging/twitter-ish thing. You can find me at https://social.joncamfield.com/@jon , but what you see there (unless you create an account and follow me, keep reading) will be only the public posts, visible to the world.
I am diving into deep water first and also hosting my own server, but please check out https://joinmastodon.org/ on how you can create an account on any of a number of community led and peer-managed sites, and use those to interact! It’s magical that way, in that any server can interact with any other server (unless Bad Things happen, but that is a feature of a decentralized world!)
I truly hope to see you sending me a follow request soon, and would love to answer any questions on how to get set up on this “fediverse” of accounts – or if this is too much, I’d also simply love to hear from you, see some photos, and hear how you’re doing.