Video download link | md5sum 7c884500952f168d688703adb08a460b Quitting Social Control is Fun Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The Social Control Media exodus (or diaspora) away from Facebook and/or Twitter has become a diaspora of JoinDiaspora because longtime JoinDiaspora users are asked to move to another pod, losing all their connections in the process; this is a symptom if not a hallmark of Social Control Media as a concept (all your so-called 'friends' are transient, temporary, or a binary bit in someone else's database -- a database that will be permanently buried in JoinDiaspora's case)

THE Web site (or pod) JoinDiaspora has been good to me. I habitually sent money to the podadmin (Lukas) and JoinDiaspora was a generally friendly community -- a mixture of very technical people and lesser-technical people with interest in technology. But all things come to an end and Lukas decided it's time to move on, perhaps (in part) due to technical debt. It's one of the downsides of complex sites with databases; the complicated nature of them makes them harder to maintain, unlike Gemini for instance. As an associate of ours noted this atternoon, "technical debt can be a killer if it is allowed to build up, and it takes effort and time to keep it at bay. It is important to trim when possible, keep it simple, and refactor when possible and appropriate."

"I can better focus on articles and concentrate on what truly matters."Almost 24 hours have passed (at the time of writing; the video is being transcoded at the moment) and I don't miss JoinDiaspora. I don't miss Social Control Media in general. For the first time in 13 years I have little or no expectation of receiving notifications from Twitter. That's a positive. I can better focus on articles and concentrate on what truly matters. Furnishing some private company's database is poor (mis)use of time. It's not your database. It is not even your data! As Salzberg of Diaspora (cofounder) put it: "When you give up that data, you're giving it up forever ... The value they give us is negligible in the scale of what they are doing, and what we are giving up is all of our privacy."

As Wikipedia notes: "The [Diaspora] founders started the project after being motivated by a February 2010 speech of the Columbia University law professor Eben Moglen. In his speech, delivered to the Internet Society's New York Chapter, "Freedom in the Cloud", Moglen described centralized social networks as "spying for free.""

Our hope is that readers and viewers will decide to similarly quit Social Control Media; it's a net negative, especially nowadays (it's not about information anymore!). Techrights never bothered with Social Control Media; this is about my personal account and the account inherited by Tux Machines. ⬆