What I think facebook is guilty of this. We were all online, but we were all online for our own separate motivations. Some sharing pictures. Some writing blog stye updates. Some sharing central feed posts. Some chatting with a few friends. Some talking politics. Some organizing for weddings.
Facebook created the image that we were closer friends than we actually were in our 20s, then ripped the image apart in our 30s.
We need to think deeply if we were ever as close as we pretended and then remake the friendships if they actually were real. Those of us who never were friends in the past could always re-evaluate and see if we are better fit to be friends now.
If I did actually destroy good friendships, I want to repair them. If we were just imagining it there’s nothing to repair, but we could evaluate each other.
We need to take a long view on this and stabilize in the middle.
Until facebook does its next major redesign, the downward spiral is going to continue as traffic continues to hemorrhage and we will all feel “unfriended.”
edit: I really loved and found comfort in the idea that we were all online using our real names together. And we’re never going to have that feeling again because Facebook has hit its peak and the rest of the web is anonymous or semi-anonymous. I’m truly open to coming together with friends. The days where I’m trying to shock are over.
I’ve been debating putting my foot down and telling lancaster county probation that living in lancaster just doesn’t work and it’s the cause of the mental health problems. I don’t want to be here and I’m stuck here.
One of the things that has held me back is the potential that some people I know online could become closer to me – at least as friends – if I don’t move to Philly since we’re originally from Lancaster.
But at this length of time I’m starting to conclude that it’s all an illusion, there’s no desire to break through the internet profiles, so I should just do what I’m doing because our relationship is internet based only. Internet only relationships can be maintained anywhere. And the problem is if facebook declines we’ll lose that part of connection as well.
This is the truth. If I’m forced to make a quick decision about geographical relocation, nobody who hasn’t met me in person and only traded profiles with me over the internet would stop me. If you wanted to hold me back from moving to a certain place you’d be reaching out to me and telling me not to in person.
What my “friends” have to decide is this. If our relationship is going to be mainly telephone and internet, it doesn’t really matter if I leave Lancaster and Philly is still pretty close. If we’re actually going to hang out in person, then where I move would matter.
I have no person, male or female, who hangs around me enough in person, that if there was an impending move to philly I would break it off for them.
Basically, by not hanging out with me in person, you’re telling me “it doesn’t matter where you go we’ll still have the internet and/or or phones.”
I’ve already gotten over the group thing where people hang out with popular class mates and it annoys me. I’m looking at people as individuals.
I’m good with having remote located friends but understand that if my friends don’t do anything they’ll stay that way.
The only reason I called out certain geographical areas was for shock value to people who have never seen bad neighborhoods. They don’t know what a bad neighborhood is like. I was living in LItitz Pa at the time. Former class mates just haven’t seen broad enough horizons. That was all it was about.
With a new phone, I’m just never calling out neighborhoods again. There is a chance people can reverse lookup your name from your phone over time and misunderstandings can happen. People who accessed my facebook from the old phone, reverse looking it up, should now get what happened.
Never think that because you don’t give people your name, that they won’t use your phone to find your facebook. That’s what I’m learning. And even if you shut off phone verification on facebook, it could show up on google in a few years.
I also believed the phone got tapped. It was an old model, which could be tapped. Weird people showed up getting hints on my behaviors. The phone shut itself off in response to a post.
Note: I did not upload any original photos of any neighborhoods, I merely posted links.
Everyone had the internet in college with their pc set up. Phones were not there yet. However, I rarely used Facebook until it opened to the world. Meaning, I was surfing all kinds of other websites, forums, blogs, news websites etc. (and creating websites) while other people were surfing Facebook. Then, Facebook opened to the whole world and suddenly I thought I could use it kind of as a front page with people I actually know and real names.
The way the internet used to be, these communities would spring up, but then they would just die off, making Facebook look secure. However, Facebook has mislead people. It has trapped people in this circle where the conversations are never very deep and the circle does not grow. It has then also penalized people who have pivoted their audiences after Facebook opened up.
In summary, Facebook opened to the world after starting off as school based, but then penalized people for opening up with it and trapped people in small, low quality circle while seeming to be a secure alternative for long term posting.
Having written that I am not necessarily advising deactivating, because then nobody is going to be able to find anyone. That is the only reason I do not deactivate.
The Reddit Post
Title: Are private corporations a bigger threat to free speech than government?
Body: I understand as per subreddit rules that legally private corporations do have a right to restrict free speech.
What I question, is that our real problem though? Are big corporations a bigger problem than big government?
I would say yes. Again, I get what the laws and rights are.
This is a thread I want to preserve a link to on my personal centralizing website.
Are private corporations a bigger threat to free speech than government? from FreeSpeech
This is the reddit post. If it is modded it will be relocated to termiteunderground and then the link will be fixed. This is an ideological post of significant importance. It was updated in response to suggestions in the comments.
A person deciphering political ideology through philosophy may start as a populist seeing society’s problems as a conflict between the masses and the politicians. Over time though trust starts to deteriorate in the opposition populist politicians who portray themselves as the solution to other politicians (trust deteriorates from the same individual who has been watching the process from the beginning).
Politicians continue to disappoint whether they are left wing, right wing or no wing. However, conversations with average people show them to be just as deceived as the politicians are. The cynicism turns two sided instead of one sided. It is then concluded that politicians at the top expose problems at the bottom of society thus repositioning the analysis of where the problem starts. Thus invalidating this individual’s populism and making the person distrustful of the masses.
This describes my basic path and can apply to others. The result of this is to reposition philosophically while viewing politics in a much more Machiavellian way – even distrusting those politicians who portray themselves as opposition. Distrust does not mean exclusion. It means you look beneath the slogans and rhetoric and start with this two sided cynicism that hits even laypeople and so called opposition politicians (you’ve long been distrustful of mainstream politicians).
Populism and the Masses from PoliticalPhilosophy
I thought facebook was something I could rely on to entertain myself for my whole life. I never thought it would have fallen off this far this early. It’s not like athletics. It’s typing on a keyboard and using a phone.
BUT. There is a silver lining. The decline has been over the last 5 years and we’ve been at rock bottom for a year. It can’t get any worse than it is now. There is no further path down. And I didn’t commit suicide.
With a redesign and more open policy to connect new people, perhaps there can be a modest come back although I think the peak will be a lower peak. It needs to transform into a “meet new people” website but Zuckerberg is against that because of the Metaverse.
Zuckerberg just doesn’t get it showing your life offline to online has been maxed out people are looking to expand now and move into new territory by cross pollinating different social networks. You can only keep it real so many times. People want to meet new people.
I have plenty of reasons I could live in the past and I know not to live in the past.
We’re too far out of school to still glorify class mates. Especially those of us who had no friends.
What pissed the classmate people off a lot is posts that were like atheistic Muslim sympathizing posts. Basically saying “I don’t agree with Islam but I agree with the tactical goals of Islamofascists.” Those sort of posts really got the preppy classmate people going.
Now if that stuff got me shadow banned, I knew facebook couldn’t handle Trump. Trump took the troll stuff I was doing and made it on a global level, openly playing the heel. Dividing people into supporters and opponents.
It’s a shame because I feel people should have been able to pivot towards a non-classmate audience and choose politics if that’s what they wanted to do.
On telegram, if you add contacts from your phone number, it keeps the phone number. BUT. If you add people by screen name it doesn’t give you the phone number. So I can post @gb819 right here and nobody can get my number from it. but anyone could contact me through it. You run a search with the @ sign to search for people without the phone numbers in a “secret chat.” It’s web.telegram.org if you aren’t on your phone, otherwise it’s an app.
Telegram also allows you to make large groups where everyone talks to each other.
The main reason I don’t add people on instagram is I don’t want to make the same mistake I made on facebook, where I added and accepted a bunch of people, but later on those people complained too much so I lost access to the central feed.
The other reason is that photos to me are mainly humor. They’re not really modeling. They’re humor.
But I’m open to slowly and carefully adding people but I don’t want building my instagram list to become an obsession.
I have this habit of mining through the lists of other people to see who is following them, but that’s just for fun. Kind of like “look who follows who.” But I don’t indulge the habit frequently or spend much time doing it.
edit: At first instagram made no sense to me, but it’s making more sense to me. People don’t want a virtual reality tour with a metaverse they just want a place to host their photos.
But what doesn’t make sense to me is people who are real serious about who is on their list and who isn’t. It says nothing about being a friend.
I also needed to solve the text post issue before I solved the photo issue. Because photos aren’t my main thing.