Speaking from personal experience, with and without it...

Social control media is not (and was never) a substitute for real social life; it's a mostly meaningless time drain

Summary: Social control media is generally a waste of time; no president (or state leader) was ousted because of the number of "likes" (they're not even a currency) and all Social Control Media Web sites are short-lived bubbles of disorganised (mis)information

DEPENDING on what one deems "social [control] media", I've probably been 'on it' since 2005 with Digg.com, where I was ranked 17^th overall (nearly 200 promotions to the front page). As one LibrePlanet talk explained last month, one might consider USENET a "form" of "social [control] media", but I'd not go that far because it's more like E-mails and if newsgroups count as "social [control] media", then "social [control] media" goes back to the early 1980s. Social control media -- no matter if federated, or decentralised, or peer to peer, or "open source", or free/libre -- is generally a waste of time. Hard to maintain, distracting, and totally not worth it. People should set up blogs, then use RSS feeds to 'federate'. Vastly better from a free speech point of view among many other aspects. Too much of people's communications has been centralised this past decade and even E-mail has been centralised (many conflate E-mail with GMail).

"Too much of people's communications has been centralised this past decade and even E-mail has been centralised (many conflate E-mail with GMail)."A month ago I left all social control media. It wasn't a staged exit and it was immediate, 'cold turkey'. Looking back, I realise that I miss none of that. Moreover, I've since then seen two articles about people who did the same thing and had no regrets. We've mentioned their experiences in Daily Links.

Remember that those things being centralised isn't really their main problem (or the main downside). I used to think that it was, but over the years I've used about a dozen different social control media sites, most of them decentralised, and the main concern was uptime, including long-term commitment. Many sites just shut down with barely a prior warning or contingency. A lot of history was lost.

"Spend not a moment longer on "social [control] media"; emancipate yourself from that."If you care about the past and if you value your work, focus on self-hosting blogs, or Gemini capsules, or something along those lines (Gemini lowers the technical debt considerably). The future of the Internet and the future of the Web (I reckon it will last only another decade before it warps into something totally different; Chrome is the new Adobe Flash) will be shaped by those who thought ahead, exercising caution and foresight. The future of the Web isn't Twitter or Facebook. "Apps" too are a passing fad. A lot of 'free' video hosting will shut down or become like television (broadcast conglomerates with advertising).

Spend not a moment longer on "social [control] media"; emancipate yourself from that. Nobody in the future will cherish a "like" or a one-sentence "shitpost" (or shower thought). Nobody will care or even remember. ⬆