Gregory's ServerI really am begging organizations to stop using Facebook or Twitter as the only way they distribute information.
Please don't make me make an account to see information
 67 comments
 @philip_cardella @annaecook there are huge numbers of Buddhist monasteries who also do this. #Buddhism @imaginary_minx @annaecook And I actually USE discord for things!   @amydentata @annaecook correct. Never done it and so this information is lost to me, but it's mainly garbage anyways, so I see it as a win win. If schools or similar only use closed systems try to help them with transition, or using multiple channels simultaneous.  @annaecook every damn time i see one i just get grumpy and close the tab  @annaecook Even folks on Mastodon have posted x.com links here as if the full thread could be seen by anyone. I don't know how the visibility works for Instagram or Facebook (no accounts there), but I also have trouble viewing those links sometimes if permissions aren't set correctly.  Yeah, I have Firefox Focus and Facebook just tells me to fuck off when it loads there. @ahimsa_pdx @annaecook   @annaecook Good news: I only distribute info across the Fediverse. Feel free to love me - I'm loveable.  @annaecook seeing as how news orgs are finally posting here might change that soon. Hopefully this will happen relatively quickly as they don't have to deal with Musk anymore. What will #ElonMusk have to do before more people finally ditch his #Gab2p0? Does he actually have to #InvadePoland before they get the message? What happened to "If you knowing and willingly sit at a table with four nazis, then there are five nazis sitting at a table?" @FatherEnoch @annaecook @aral  @annaecook not sure what to tell you, I hate it as much as you do,, but there it is  @annaecook last winter our water board only posted updates on Facebook during a winter storm that resulted in a few boil advisories. I kept an account for stuff like that. It is irritating.  As a desperate indie author, I am literally on EVERYTHING except Twitter.  @annaecook YouTube has started doing that too. Several times, it told me to open a gmail account in order to view videos. @AskPippa @annaecook Get the desktop app Freetube and enjoy YouTube without ads, no google account required, no tracking, no suggested videos. Bliss.   @annaecook I got a Silver Alert (missing senior citizen) for my area and clicked through - to a fucking X post from the sheriff's office.  @annaecook @Gargron To take this one step further: I really am begging organizations to stop using Facebook or Twitter as the only live chat support option. Please don't make me make an account to chat with a customer service representative.  There's *no* information provided by those entities you can't find elsewhere without the turmoil and trauma and general bad shit you receive on those sites. Simply look elsewhere. Anything *that* important is information provided by multiple sources on multiple sites.  @annaecook I would desperately like to see emergency, government and international orgs get on board with this. I have been personally asking certain organizations to stop posting on Twitter and to ditch FB but they are prone to ignorance inertia. What can we do?  Stop selling your soul to the company store!!! Stop selling us humans to a corporation. Take back the Internet from corporate control. Self hosting EVERYTHING at MPAQ!!!  @annaecook @jeff This is literally a cognitive accessibility issue. I know because those are places I cannot go without my autistic-ass brain spazzing out at the glut of fake “information” and supranormal stimuli *designed* to distract even folks *without* ADHD. Not even exaggerating: exposure to Facebook causes me to break out in mental hives, which looks exactly like uncontrollable rage to the people who live outside my head. It’s a real problem for me.  @annaecook yep. These services are not open communication mediums. They are not public forums. When they publish only on closed forums, they're obligating their customers to have accounts. @annaecook agree. If someone thinks it only belongs on facebook/twitter it's clearly not important enough to bother with California Highway Patrol sends emergency Amber and Silver Alerts with links to check their Twitter for details. Is this a public safety issue now?  Yup. Ann Arbor shut down a major bike path last with no postings and no detour info. When I emailed to say wtf they said they’d posted it on social media and asked how else they could have reached residents. Umm how about a sign on the flipping bike route?!? This is a route that doesn’t follow roads so rerouting can be very confusing.  @annaecook And then some have perfectly good platforms already and *STILL* use locked in networks that are beholden to CEOs' whims despite this. Actual GOVERNMENTS use that crap. Meanwhile there have been solutions for a long time, but as we see right here first-hand, the Fediverse pretty much offers exactly what they're looking for. Each of them could host their own Fediverse instance for their posts. Even if a person's instance blocks that instance, they could just view it accountless. @annaecook I think the one that drives me the most crazy is how freaking everyone moved stuff like tech support/etc over to Discord servers. Putting aside that you have to trust Discord, as you say, it requires an account and they have to join the "server" just to gain access to the channels (and then there are often hoops to jump through to activate account access.) And now people who use Discord have 5000 channels with notifications they have to just mute. @annaecook Family members also love to do this. I adamantly refuse. Suppose I will remain uninformed. @annaecook Both platforms are trash... @annaecook What should start happening is that orgs host their own Mastodon servers. That way you can create an account exclusive to that server (or not), and it can be as private or public as they want it to be. Self-hosted, so the data belongs to the org. You can do it on a 2009 PC. It scares me how tech-clueless so many orgs are.  @annaecook A company I'm currently looking for an alternative for has stopped using email for customer support. When I tried to send them a picture of the damaged product I got an auto-reply "to keep our service as prompt as possible we have removed email as a communication channel with our Customer Care team." When I finally got around to calling them (their stupid chatbot doesn't work) I asked them how to send them the picture, their response was "facebook." 🤦♂️ @annaecook I always make a big fuss whenever someone or some organization asked me to use Facebook. I prefer to be in the dark about things..... @annaecook We have lost that game already. Only national legislation can change that. People are just sheeps after all. I'm still not going to create an account.. @annaecook I agree with your account message, but #Mastodon for whatever reasons (eg, data harvesting) doesn't offer historical searching. Last time I checked we get two days back. I historical search on the other social networks daily.  @postpunky @annaecook data is expensive, we won't all be able to hold all the data on the Fediverse at one time. The only way we'll get that is if we allow a big corporation to move in, aka Threads..🤷♂️ Retention isn't the issue. You can manually scroll back your entire history or anyone else's. The time limitation is searching. @postpunky @annaecook that's my misunderstanding. ElasticSearch is really resource intensive. I have a 16 gb ram server and elasticsearch uses 50% of my resources alone.😬 @BeAware @postpunky @annaecook but that is the default configuration. elasticsearch assumes it's the only process and will use your resources. if you want it to use less, change the heap configuration 😅  @postpunky @annaecook I am not sure what you mean by that, but if you opted into being indexed in search, then all your posts are searchable, regardless of the date. Maybe your instance admin configured something to remove some non-local messages to save disk space? @postpunky @annaecook This is hashtag search, I am not sure exactly how it works but its probably related to trends calculation, which works only in the past few days (as trends are by definition recent)  @annaecook Nothing but Facebook Groups has ever succeeded for local bicycling and other Groups. The closest alternative was probably early blogs back when RSS readers were built into browsers. Calendar feeds are a particularly sad example. I wish this were not so. X can be avoided, but not Facebook. @annaecook I mean why is it so hard to have a simple RSS feed that sends out notices... seriously @annaecook I just ran into the same problem yesterday. A local café had all their information including menus on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, so I immediately set it on my blacklist (= ResQ Club will no longer send me notifications about leftover food they sell for cheap in the afternoon/evening). Obviously they don't want my business, so they're not getting it. *shrug* @annaecook I'd like to add: Please give us at least an RSS feed. If you don't want to don't want to discuss with us anyway, someone will create a bot to send the RSS content into the Fediverse. |
@annaecook and then there's inside networks (like school PTSA) that will only use What's App, which is just Facebook again. Or use Instagram for announcements, which, again, is just Facebook. Barf.
Totally agree with you.