Removing Traces of Mastodon.Social: Rejecting Social Control Media and Oppressive Systems and Embracing Freedom
Yesterday, I realized that after Mastodon.Social set a shadowban on me and I left, I forgot to delete my account. So I did.
I gave up dealing with Social Control Media and moved to platforms where they won’t really do anything about me instead.
It’s not that I’m a monster, it’s just that I have differing political opinions than people like Eugen Rochko (AKA Gargron), who is a colossal asshole.
And anywhere you go, you end up encountering difficult people like these.
Amazingly, when I was searching for him because “How the hell do I spell his name again?”, he re-posted an LGBT Pride Flag that says “Everybody Welcome”.
Well, yes, everyone who is a Democrat or one of their ilk (whatever you call a pseudo-leftist globalist where you are) is welcome, freethinkers and Libertarians need not apply.
It’s not that I’m against all content moderation. You definitely need to delete violent shit, threats, obscene content, illegal content, but I didn’t do any of this.
Automattic (WordPress.com) has banned me before, for this article criticizing Apple and their assistance with implementing censorship laws being proposed in America.
I’m now posting on Gemini at gemini://gemlog.blue/users/BaronHK/ and one of the reasons is that so if they hit me again, I don’t lose everything.
Unreasonable moderators and corporate toadies carrying water for criminal organizations like Microsoft are a thing that goes on in Reddit, which is one reason I deleted my user account there.
They don’t like people who are trying to change the world for the better, so they get rid of you, so that people can post pictures of Windows in the Linux subreddit and ask all sorts of stupid questions and post photographs of their junk.
Seriously, people post nude pictures of themselves for Conde Nasty. Stuff that can be used to blackmail them later. Stuff that can get them fired from their jobs.
Then Conde Nasty watches the people who view them, they record everything the user looks at with scripts and server logs and 15 year browser cookies, even if you are not logged in.
To be perfectly clear, it is easy to “ban evade” Social Control Networks and just set up another account, but if you speak too much you’ll just irritate someone else who has gone power mad and it will happen all over again.
One of the “Social Media Death Spiral” things going on is that, take Matrix.org for example.
When I opened Firefox ESR today (only to find out that Mozilla flipped the adware on again), where I had a tab open (because I don’t use Firefox that often, preferring LibreWolf and SeaMonkey due to the trash Mozilla put in their browser), I had hundreds of chatrooms open!
Many of them stalled out months ago. Although some weeks ago.
Pretty much all of them except some of the ones about developing a particular computer program are completely dead.
This is what “Codes of Conduct” and mods acting as “Janitors” do to communities. They kill them. Why are there hundreds of people lurking in there doing nothing?
This is not vibrant.
When you make people afraid to say most of the the things they want to say, eventually nobody says anything of substance. Consider how bland Reddit is, and how you can go thousands of posts in and see nothing worth reading.
So instead of engagement, which platforms like Reddit, Facebook, and X/Twitter seek, you get disengagement.
Does Matrix.org have a business model? No. The company that runs it laid off. Facebook had major layoffs, Reddit and Twitter. Oh, lots of layoffs. “lol”
So they’re just kind of these, “Zombie Entities” now that go on as sort of a husk of themselves, and Youtube is like that too. People lose interest and find out that their real lives are much more interesting, and leave.
So these platforms think the best way to deal with lurkers, like me, is to attack the privacy proxies people run (things like libreddit or Piped/Invidious for YouTube) to drive us to the main site. They seem to think there’s gold in the “marginally attached user” hills and they can force us to “engage!” against our will. But they can’t.
We either don’t use that thing or we figure out another way to modify the site.
Websites pushing for Google “WEI” attestation are just digging their own grave further.
What will happen is that more users will reject this and just not use the site. When users have no control, no voice over something, they leave.
I might set things up so I can do some banking on the phone and otherwise not even use the browser there. But most sites and platforms are totally disposable. They are replaceable with other things. It’s no different than a malicious operating system like Mac or Windows, or a Linux system that’s gone bad, like Fedora. When Fedora went bad, I left.
Many people who are oppressed, which is what Google WEI will do to them, in a different way than Social Control Media did, will leave the oppressor and fight the oppression.
When I deleted my Facebook account, I noticed at some point they require logging in to see a Facebook page, so I just don’t click on Facebook links at all. After Elon Musk put up a registration wall on X/Twitter, I never looked at that again. Even now that some Nitter instance has apparently worked around it, I no longer care.
The Web, for me, is a pretty quiet experience due to the way I browse, and what I browse, now.
There will essentially be no difference to what Google gets away with even when Mozilla collapses. And at least if they do collapse, they may be less of a menace to SeaMonkey.
From SeaMonkey’s IRC room, I can tell you that Mozilla is deeply deeply disliked and they’re now free to discuss it because there’s nothing else Mozilla can do. They already said “Get off our lawn.” regarding the Bugzilla and the Wiki and build system.
Since Mozilla is circling the toilet with 77 million fewer users since January 2019, I think it’s safe to say they have no future. Where did their plan to become a Social Control Media platform with Mastodon go, anyway?
Vivaldi set up a Mastodon instance in about 10 seconds, almost as an afterthought.
Mozilla sure made a hell of a lot of noise, but nothing ever came of it.
Maybe they realized it would cost them money and there’s no way to shove ads all over it like their browser because people can browse to a different instance.
They don’t even appear to think about hitting the “Post” button with these press releases anymore, obviously.
What happened to Mozilla AI? Have we heard anything about this? Nope.
These people have absolutely no idea what the mission even is anymore. It’s all hype. ⬆