1059
Cindy Cohn (EFF) Warns Jon Stewart That Americans Have to Make X and Meta ‘Less Important’
(www.thewrap.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Apr 2026
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It remains insane to me that it's so hard for so many to just, not use them. Truly, your life is not being enriched by twitter or Facebook. You can delete your account and I promise you won't find yourself missing them.
Living rurally, the main thing I hear is "but marketplace". It's a pretty crucial way of getting cheap goods.
Honestly Marketplace is the best argument for FB today. How it has usurped Craigslist I don't understand, maybe because it's easier to navigate, but you're right that it is the defacto modern market.
I don't use it so I forget about it, but this is a good counterpoint.
I believe a major reason is reputation tied to a person's account. OfferUp has also superceded Craigslist in my area and I think the user history and reputation system plays a role there. Same with other stuff like eBay, Mercari, StockX. Craigslist is too anonymous
Networking Effect is a bitch. It's like telling someone to stop using AT&T or United Airlines. These are the major arteries of communication for billions of people. Individuals can't abstain from using them without isolating themselves.
Spoken like someone who doesn't have their entire extended family posting and chatting on the sites regularly. I get calls from extended family, asking me to weigh in on long conversations and exchanges and posting sprees. And then when I respond on the phone, I get a "No, you have to post it, I'm not going to just repeat it to everyone for you".
Tons of social pressure to just go where everyone else is.
The problem is addiction. Same as any other drug. It's no coincidence that Facebook and X were rolled out as free services, with free accounts, where you can interact with anyone for free.
Before the digital drug dealers running each changed that deal. Needing money, running ads, and restricting what you can do that all used to be free.
These companies got us addicted to using tech in place of human socialization and then monitized that addiction.
People can't leave because for some it's the only human contact they have. Even if it's artificial, they still want it to the point of it hurting themselves. Just like any other addiction.
edit: misunderstood comment, thought it was replying to a later comment in the thread, sorry
Ditto reddit. I thought it would be this huge loss. It's the opposite.
Even without lemmy, there's so much more to the internet than these threads under a link aggregator.
I'm not that surprised that people can't quit Instagram, to be honest. I still miss the posts of some of the artists I like. Some of them really put me in a good mood. I can't for the life of me understand why they don't take 2 minutes a day to at least copy-paste their Insta posts to Pixelfed or literally anything in the fediverse. Hell, at least Bluesky. I'm not even talking about huge arena-filling bands that have someone handle their socials. I'm talking about indie bands that would genuinely benefit from small community building and would probably be embraced around here for going against the flow.
A lot of them don't know about or don't understand the fediverse. We need to be more proactive in asking this of the artists we love. I'll try to be better about doing my part to mention the fediverse to artists in my sphere, an especially good fit given the DIY roots of the punk/hardcore lineage of much of it.
and don't be pushy and annoying about it. just ask if they're on mastodon. if they're not just say "ah bummer" and mov on
Tbh I think you can one time drop a very friendly but more direct: "hey have you guys thought about posting your stuff in a music community on Lemmy? It's like reddit but smaller and with a very engaged audience. I think they'd dig you there!" Or something to that effect. Just don't be a dick about it or spam them.
exactly. make the artist feel like there's an audience to be reached, not like the only point is ideological purity
I don't think you'll find that the case. Most people have a problem. They are incapable of being even slightly bored.
If you take away twittler and Facebook, they'll readily replace them with BlueSky, YouTube and TikTok because they're easy and low effort.
It's harder to read a book, do a craft, go for a walk, or anything truly enriching.
My wife tried to exit TT when things got political. She lasted 2 weeks before she made a new non-political following account and went right back at it.
I left Facebook quite some time ago, but have to go back regularly for my HOA bs. I still peek in on my old friendships while i'm there, but don't engage and make sure to leave quickly.
Tbh, I know this will be a hot take, but I do think Tiktok is a vastly better network. Tumblr too. These are still actual social media platforms.
Yes, they're deeply algorithm-based, yes they're for-profit, capitalist networks still, but I think they are miles better than FB/Insta or Twitter/X. Have you looked at somebody's Facebook? 90%+ of posts are corporate, political, special interest. Almost nobody actually posts anything, they just reshare an endless stream of garbage content entirely divorced from the human experience.
At least Tiktok, despite its many legitimate problems and criticisms, is still largely a human-driven platform. It's still a place where people are making, sharing, and consuming real human posts in the interest of connection.
Tiktok is still social media. I genuinely don't think FB or X have been social media in many many years.
With you on Tumblr
TT is scarier now that it's 'controlled'. in 1984 concepts, I expect they'll be sending agents to take care of people that are anti-rightwing.
Absolutely, TT is scary and the take-over has been insanely obvious. Despite this people are still regularly making real content and connections on TT. Tiktok, the company and app themselves, are vile and disgusting, but Tiktok, the community, is still largely very decent, imo.
I deleted my facebook in 2019 and havent been contacted by my friends since, that is, people i had known for a decade, before we were allnusing facebook
but i am maybe better off