So at some point today I’ll probably log back onto Facebook. But the week without wasn’t so bad at all, allowing that I felt disconnected from my friends, classmates, and co-workers. They tend not to show up anywhere else like on Blue Sky. So I’ll be back if only to maintain my connection there. But that’s all. I happily found plenty of online entertainment to while away the hours when I should be doing something else, elsewhere.

• I am on BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). Whiling away the hours scrolling through my BlueSky feed is fun and informative, but getting a constant stream of Oh God What The Fuck Has Trump Done Now can be painful at times. I know we need to stay aware, but you have to be careful not to let it deliver you into despair.
• YouTube is easy and fun to just scroll through, even if you haven’t bought the subscription. My brother does this for hours as a way of decompressing after work. This is almost a one on one replacement for Instagram, which is a Meta site, but I remain looking for an alternative source of still photography of cute guys. The video clips of movies and TV shows are nice.
• I joined Reddit after reading about the MAGA bellyaching that it was freezing out or limiting the reach of Nazis on the site. I took a look and found a lot of chatter about banning crossposting from Musk’s Twitter, all of which was positive. So I signed in and discovered a rich source of information and entertainment I can scroll through untainted by MAGA/Nazi poison. I was assigned a very weird login name but I can change by visible user name at some point to my own I think.

The only thing I really missed was hearing from friends and classmates. Only one regularly posts on BlueSky and I don’t think any of them are on Reddit, and I get nearly no traffic on this life blog. So the only place I have online to chat with friends and family is Facebook. This is how Meta keeps us hostage to its business model, which Zuckerberg is tilting hard, toxic masculinity right. But we don’t have to capitulate. A former Meta lawyer, fed up with it, posted this and bullet point 2 is especially relevant here:

No more clicking through to buy things. No more checking in. And in the future I’ll be looking for ways to keep Meta cookies off my computers and smartphone because my online activity is also something Meta sells to advertisers. I have location services turned off on the smartphone apps, and I’ll be looking for any chatter about Meta working around that.