I'm signed out of Facebook until the 26th. (I hope I can stay strong.)

Places like this and Bluesky are all that are going to keep me sane while I detox.

I deleted my IG and will go sign out of FB now. Bluesky is holding my interest.

Yay benign boobs, msbelle!

David, online options are good. But yeah, fucking nightmare to switch. I am still so excited about your Japan trip and Matilda’s stay. I know you will love it!

I have logged off all meta apps for now. I hope to stay off them indefinitely. Bluesky is working for me. And snapchat.

I dipped a toe into Red Note (Xiaohongshu), which is pretty intriguing.

Disassociating from the news for a few days. Working on a music project with the local historical society, am starting a class on running non-profits, and reading.

Well, I thought real hard about leaving Facebook before, so I guess now I really ought to do it. Shame as I only just introduced my mother to Instagram so she could watch the Ben Fensome Pride and Prejudice videos. Will the board take me back?

I tend to drift away from b.org because I can't keep up. Then I visit again, swear I'm going to stay involved, then forget, rinse, repeat. Indeed, Facebook is mostly a more asynchronous way for me to keep up with you people. But it looks like almost all my other social avenues are becoming morally insupportable. It might be time to take a good hard look at gmail.

I wonder if I still own any address books?

Hi Emily!

This place is like a refuge. I still miss when it was more active though.

FB has become more than 50% posts that are ads or groups/people I follow not follow and most of those seem to be bots or accounts that just repost crap. Lots of AI images, fake stories, clickbait.

Hi, msbelle!

Yeah, I wonder when the revenue loss from driving people away outweighs that gained by promoting sponsored content? I don't really know how the financials work, anyway - some of the groups that show up in my feed are very niche, it's hard for me to believe someone's paying to have them promoted! I will miss having pictures to remind me of who everyone is, though, or at least what anime character to associate them with.

It is nice that if I post needing hairpats, someone wil probably respond on FB almost immediately. What are people doing to keep up with important news asynchronously? Email lists? Webrings? How far backwards do we need to go, and can we, or were we always financial Wiley E. Coyotes, running past the end of the cliff and not realizing until too late that venture capital and speculation was the only thing keeping us up? Did angelfire make money? Geocities? Do I still have a site somewhere?

Hmm. It's possible I over-post.

I'm limiting my screen time to a minimum while to go through the eye surgeries. The one eye that is done objects to the brightness, but I am not going to bother with any settings until I am past recovery on the 2nd eye which gets done Tuesday. So conveniently I will be mostly offline for the next couple weeks. I did go on FB today to post a picture for my son's 33rd birthday.

It is a gentle way to start to minimalize my engagement with FB. Other platforms have never held my interest. I've registered but never became active.

I’m spending more time here and on Bluesky and planning to lean in on that. I am going to stay away from Facebook this week, but there are a few things in relationships that I’m not sure I can replicate elsewhere that are important. My local neighborhood pages in particular, some old family friends, etc. so I’m not ready to make a clean break yet.

Insta and TikTok, I never really got into.

ION, It’s like 3° out and I just heard a noise and realized my neighbor is down on the ice fix fixing my dock that got damaged when a tree came down.

What are people doing to keep up with important news asynchronously? Email lists? Webrings?

I just saw someone on bluesky saying they were setting up a webring if you want to get in on that.

I feel like I must be missing something obvious but i can’t figure out how to log off of FB (I only use it on my phone, if that has anything to do with it)

Trying to get in the habit of bluesky and discord. I’m still at a point where i forget about them entirely for days at a time until something reminds me they exist

Will the board take me back?

Emily, honey, everyone wanders away from the caravan. You've wandered back and we're happy to see you - hot beverage of choice on the stove, drag up a cushion, tell us your doings.

I am thatparkerwoman on Bluesky. I am gently trying to coax my local Buy Nothing group to move off of FB and onto the app, but given the community it's going to be like the mountains of Kleenex that are pretty much all that's going in our trash these days: the people producing it are aware of the existence of alternatives and aren't interested; if that's as much as I can minimize output I will work with it and if an opportunity for change comes along I will jump on it.