Dumping Hate and Advertisements

There is a life after Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Amazon etc.

See also: Password protected page with contact information.

I have spent some significant time to get delete my contents in all the META social media and messengers and deleted:

Twitter: I deleted my Twitter Account immediately when Elon Musk bought the platform. That was actually the easiest since I had not used it for posting, only sometimes looked at tweets that were linked in other platforms.
Threads: This was very easy too, since I had not posted much on Threads. Gone quickly.
WhatsApp: I only subscribed to WhatsApp because it is the main platform for communication in Africa, and also used quite a bit by my project partners in Southeast Asia. I send messages to all my active contacts there where I can be found in the future (see below) and then deleted it.
Instagram: I deleted all instagram posts and comments. The likes were very resistant to being killed first, but I managed to do it a day later. My presence on Instagram will stay for a while longer, in hibernation mode, just to let my friends know where I can be reached now.
Facebook: This is the most difficult one since there is currently no replacement of the Groups and the Marketplace with a good following. I deleted all my contents on facebook, unfollowed the irrelevant groups and posted a message where I can be reached now (see below).

These took some effort and signing off the platforms was accompanied to some serious separation anxiety. I saw a lot of friends and public figures doing the same and moving to some of the platforms below, which made it a bit easier.

Amazon: I had two accounts on Amazon, one international one and one for the German market. I did not use them often, a few times in the Philippines because I trusted it more than Lazada, Shopee and Alibaba or other alternatives. but in the meantime I have managed to determine quite well who is a decent supplier on those shops, and most articles you can buy on Amazon are also available on those. I am not sure yet what happens the few Kindle e-books I had bought on Amazon when you don’t have an account anymore. Once I clarified that my Amazon accounts will be gone too. Luckily my e-book reader is not a Kindle.

So it appeared to be tougher than I thought. But it was if fact very liberating. I can now use social media without advertisement and can block haters and liars easily, so the experience is a bit like in the early days of those social media when they were not yet totally focussed on making the billionaire owners richer.

There are alternatives!!

A former colleague said when I terminated my Twitter account: “But you reach most people on Twitter.” During the Third Reich almost all Germans were reached through the Volksempfänger with Göbbels Propaganda too, the NSDAP had almost total reach. But did reach justify listening to the propaganda? Like the resistance back then, which unfortunately failed, we need to build up the non-billionaire owned social media and exchange platforms before there is no possibility to do it anymore.

Social media alternatives

There are several alternatives for social media sites. I am not going into a lot of technical descriptions here, my main criteria for choosing a site were:

Advertisement free
Open source (so algorithms can be checked)
Decentralization in hosting, ideally hosting outside the US (with the shitshow happening now in the US I lost any trust in institutions and companies in that country)
Possibility to monetize postings (just in case if in the future I would create contents that people are willing to pay for)
Reasonable user size, with some users I know, upwards trend in new user subscriptions

Platform	Advert free	Open source	Decentralized	Monetization	Ownership, Hosting	Users
Mastodon	yes	yes	yes	no	World wide	limited, increasing
Bluesky	yes	yes	??	planned	Benefit corporation, USA	30 mio. increasing
Substack	yes	No	No	Yes

For professional purposes LinkedIn is my preferred choice.
It belongs to Microsoft.

My clear favorite in terms of my criteria is Mastodon. It “is an open source, self-hosted, social networking service. Mastodon uses the ActivityPub protocol for federation which allows users to communicate between independent Mastodon instances and other ActivityPub compatible services.” (Wikipedia) The downside right now is that it still has a limited number of users, but it is increasing. I feel it is more difficult to understand and set-up than the other platforms, so I don’t assume that the user base will grow very fast.

Bluesky has a bigger user base (30 million by January 2025) and feels pretty much like Twitter in its early days, when I still used it. It puts user control over algorithms, you can block people easily, but that might have the danger that you end up creating your own echo chamber. But you control it, and not revenue driven revenue advertising algorithms. It is run by a company in the US, so that constitutes a risk. Bluesky Social PBC is a benefit corporation a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society, and not to generate shareholder value, so on principle that is a good thing.

Substack is an American online platform that provides publishing, payment, analytics, and design infrastructure to support subscription newsletters. It allows writers to send digital newsletters directly to subscribers. Founded in 2017, Substack is headquartered in San Francisco. Substack users include journalists, subject-matter experts, and media platforms, few of its newsletters publish original reporting; the majority offer personal writing, opinion pieces, research, and analysis. (Wikipedia)
I like the concept and a lot of the contents I have assessed so far, Substack has very light content moderation and also allows Nazi newsletters to be published, so I will be observing it very carefully and might quit it again.

Messaging alternatives

Finding a replacement of WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger is actually very easy. The downside is that they are lacking the integration with alternative social media sites for now.

Signal offers end-to-end encrypted voice calls for free in free and open source software on all platforms. The only data it collects from its users is the mobile telephone number that is needed for registration. Signal was endorsed by Edward Snowden.

Viber is used a lot in Southeast Asia by businesses and individuals.
In 2022, Rakuten Viber won a Security Award, by test.de, a tech firm based in Germany where there are over 3 million Viber users.

I use Skype mostly for calls to landlines abroad. It also does videotelephony, videoconferencing and voice calls. It also has instant messaging, file transfer, debit-based calls to landline and mobile telephones (over traditional telephone networks), and other features.

Line is a freeware app and service for instant messaging and social networking, operated by the Japanese company LY Corporation. It became Japan’s largest social network in 2013 and it is also popular mainly in Indonesia, Taiwan and Thailand. (Wikipedia)

I have a Telegram account, but because of their history of hosting groups like ISIS and far rights I am sort of reluctant to use it. However, if somebody does not have any of the other messengers listed here, we can use Telegram.

Social Media and Video Conferencing

For professional purposes LinkedIn is my preferred choice.
It belongs to Microsoft.

For Video conferences Zoom

For Workspace chat and Video Conferences. Teams. However, it sometimes has problems to start up on my MacBook, so I actually prefer ZOOM.

And, of course, with other Apple users: Apple FaceTime

Old school communication

And of course there are email, SMS and telephone.

Last not least there is our travel blog travel.magayon.de , of which this page is a post, a very traditional web site that I will use more to post stories.

Amazon

I had two Amazon accounts, one for Germany and one internationally. As soon as I have figured out what to do with my few e-books I bought there, I will delete both accounts. Maybe a bit more difficult to do shopping for some difficult to get items, but there are many alternatives, in particular buying at the “OEM” shops.

Why?

Tech billionaires totally flip flopped when it became clear that the Republicans would win the election. In most other countries their behavior would be called corruption.