Everybody's account will eventually be terminated; those who get banned are just 'ahead of the curve'

Summary: It's time to leave the 'Internet rot' which is social control media well behind us; blogging and RSS/XML may seem like a thing of the past, but they may as well become the future (again; if we make the correct and informed choices)

THE GAFAM 'cabal', companies like Facebook and Google, can censor a lot of news or bias the whole lot for Apple, for Microsoft, even for Amazon (which is buying puff pieces and whole newspapers). Google News is not news but a small slice of the news that's available out there and Twitter no longer pretends to be neutral; the timelines are strictly moderated 'by algorithms', they're not chronological. It's impossible to display search results chronologically for instance; this means that Twitter gets to control what people see and do not see (they also de-platform certain voices). This enables control of narrative, often for Western imperial-corporate agenda; anything outside some convention or norm is laughed out and dismissed as irrational, as TechDirt recently proved when it spoke about Google dropping it over 'standards' (never mind if each and every page in TechDirt contains Google spyware, Google Analytics, and the site's tone has long been positive regarding Google).

"Well, social control media is a passing/dying fad; it won't last forever and many more people will lose everything they wrote (as happened with Google+, which was a cautionary tale)."Once we lose control over information we lose control/sense of reality. Once we lose control over information channels (medium/media) we lose the ability to even find information. We're being spoon-fed some people's agenda and this is exactly what they want; sometimes they even pay for it, as they can afford to buy ads in Facebook or whatever (see how much money Michael Bloomberg sank into GAFAM when he had a presidential bid going; he also has his own news sites). The concept of "timeline" is space for hire/sale.

Society cannot be properly judged and cannot maintain democratic structures if information is dominated by oligarchic structures; we're at least gratified to see some change, such as people who decide to quit Twitter, Reddit, and Facebook. I saw several such examples this week. Well, social control media is a passing/dying fad; it won't last forever and many more people will lose everything they wrote (as happened with Google+, which was a cautionary tale).

We've just noticed that Red Hat's Adam Miller, who has a Red Hat tattoo on his wrist (but now works for IBM, the company that help tattoo wrists with 'barcodes' 80 years ago), is "Getting Back Into Blogging"; we need more of this:

Something I've always told myself is that I'd start blogging again, about tech or just kind of whatever seemed interesting to me at the time. I'm now making a commitment to myself that I will blog once a week. Not every blog post will be the most amazing thing anyone has ever read and it's reasonable to think that a lot of people will simple ignore a lot of what I say and I'm alright with that. If you're here, welcome! If not ... you don't even know this, but that's also cool.

A lot of sites no longer advertise their RSS feeds (even those that already have them set up). Yesterday I saw a good site of an investigative journalist who has not updated his RSS feed in 12 years! What a shame. What a loss. He's relying on Twitter instead.

To control our future we need to control the conversation; let's get back to blogging and RSS feeds. Let's say goodbye to centralised communication platforms that censor us and 'data-mine' our conversations. ⬆