It’s been five years since I uninstalled the application of Facebook from my phone and never installed it ever again, right after I watched the documentary “A social Dilemma”. After a year or so, I deactivated my main Facebook account, and only used an alternative one with no friends, just to be able to administrate pages and groups that I had created in the past. I was only activating my main account when I needed to use Facebook as a tool, to communicate actions, such as animal rescues and crowd fundings for which I needed people to help me spread the word. Each time I was re-activating that account though, I was realizing that less and less people were seeing what I was posting. Also, I often couldn’t exchange messages. People were telling me that they were receiving my messages but Facebook wasn’t allowing them to reply, saying that “this account doesn’t exist” or something similar. At some point I realized that what was Facebook helping me to achieve years ago, it could no longer help me to achieve at that time. As a result, I see no point in keep using this platform so 1,5 year ago I gave my groups to other admins and deactivated the Fb page of Ethos & Empathy (which I did activate now, just to check if the algorithm will show it to anyone, but no luck so far).
In the meantime, I started using Instagram instead but as the time was passing by, I didn’t enjoy the experience of using Instagram either. I could understand that it was becoming addictive and I could see how it was affecting human relationships and how people were changing from the moment that they started using this platform. I could see the egos floating everywhere and how this platform feeds narcissism and insecurities. So, I started deactivating this account too (by this time, I had stopped using my personal account and was only using the activist one, for Ethos & Empathy but later on, I renamed it as I was thinking to stop posting anything here) and I even got criticized by some people for that, as if I had to ask permission for the use of social media platforms that I was deciding for myself!
At last, just some months after I moved to Sweden, I heard about a seminar that took place early in September, on the alternative social media platforms that exist out there, which you can watch here:
Two days ago there was a workshop that took place on the same matter, as a continuation of that seminar. Both the seminar and the workshop were relieving and refreshing because I realized that I am not alone in my thoughts and feelings. There are more people out there who have understood how detrimental these platforms are for our mental health, how shallow the human relationships have ended up because of these platforms and thankfully some people out there, like Maia Kahlke Lorentzen from the Danish organization Cybernauterne have done some pretty serious research and have gathered all the ethical alternatives for these platforms for us:
I was happy to learn that WordPress is part of the Fediverse (Ethos and Empathy is on WordPress)!
I have already downloaded peertube, created an account on Mastodon in the vegan server (Veganism.social) and cancelled my subscription on Spotify, now that I learned that Qobuz helps you to transfer there your playlists from Spotify. Here’s a guide on alternatives to Spotify, and on how to transfer the playlists. It’s in Danish but with a translator it all makes sense.
My favourite slide was the following:
Because, for real, everything has been enshitified. You can read more about it here.
I am exhausted from the use of the alternative social media, and I am very grateful for having been able to move here, closer to people like Maia, and I got to learn for free, these ethical alternatives and I can now slowly move away from Meta, Spotify and Google…one step at a time (yes, there are alternatives even to google maps and youtube). However, there is a downside to that:
So we must be patient and stop expecting these to work as good and as fast as what we were using so far.
You can start phasing out from Meta, by uninstalling whatsapp and installing Signal instead. I did that more than 2 years ago but I did the mistake to install whatsapp again, some time ago, however two months later I uninstalled it again. Signal works just as fine as whatsapp for group chats.
As for the ones addicted to Instagram (although you may want to stop being addicted to it), there is pixelfed:
It won’t be easy to get out of Meta. We can’t do it overnight. Don’t get me wrong. I feel how hard it is, each time I deactivate my accounts. But I prefer to lose connections than to stay in unethical platforms. To begin with, you can uninstall the apps from your phone, and go mindfully on them, when you turn on your computer. It’s what I do with my alternative Fb account, through which I found the chiropractor for my dog or other information, in the group of Vegans in Skåne, otherwise I really don’t know how I could have found info like that, after having moved to a new country where I don’t speak the language. But at least this account has no info about me, not my name, I don’t post anything on my profile etc. It’s just a tool for my convenience.
If you found this post helpful and insightful, feel free to share it so you can help me spread the word.
Credit: The photos in this post are from the seminar hosted by the NGO Media Evolution, from Maia’s presentation.
Elisabeth Dimitras