I never really had ‘real’ social media, but when Google started pushing their anti privacy shit onto YouTube i knew i hated the entire concept. Haven’t found a real alternative to YouTube as a whole, but I’ve left where i can.

I never had Facebook but I immediately deleted my Twitter account when I heard Musk wanted to buy it, I didn’t think it was funny at the time and wanted nothing to do with Musk.

I saw where FB was going in like … 2009? I had always recognized the value of the Internet as being anonymity. You had to survive on what you could convince people of, what you could argue.

Facebook broke anonymity, and as soon it dawned on me, I left.

I quit Facebook the first Trump presidency. The reason was I didn’t want to hate my Grandma. In most ways she’s a sweet old woman but goddamn, get the woman started talking about politics and she becomes a nazi.

I wanted to pretend that part of her didn’t exist and I couldn’t stay on Facebook without calling this kind of stuff out for her and everyone else in my family who are all Trump supporters causing lots of drama in my life. For the sake of family peace, I quit and never looked back.

Never even started Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok.

All I did in the meanwhile was Reddit which was nice because it was all anonymous, but got permabanned there for being a little too supportive of my boy Luigi. So now I’m here.

My last straw was Reddit. By then I already left Facebook, and I was never engaged with Twitter due to the format.

I’ll try to keep it short: years ago I told a self-identified Nazi to kill himself, and got suspended for “multiple, repeated violations of the content policy”. The ban applied to 3/4 of my accounts but not to the one I used to moderate a small subreddit; Reddit was saying “we don’t want you here except when you work for free like a sucker”.

Eventually I hopped into Lemmy, and lurked for a few years while only creating trolling accounts in Reddit, to ruin the place from the inside. Then the APIcalypse happened, and I finally got enough content in Lemmy to interact with it.

I just got so tired of FB. The addictive cycle, the lack of privacy (I really don’t enjoy everyone knowing when I’m using the fuckin app), all of it. Never looked back.

I left Reddit around the IPO. My account still exists but mostly just for niche communities like video games from time to time.

Working on de-googling and focusing on FOSS alternatives.

I had to implement a Facebook Pixel for a client about a decade ago; learning how that worked and how wildly effective it was at tracking Facebook users, even while not logged into Facebook, was enough to drive me off mainstream social media.

Twitter the day after the election. Should’ve done it sooner but I never really used it anyway.

I can’t remember what made me dump Facebook. The only reason I had one was a couple of friends that wanted to play games there. Marvel avengers alliance in particular, but a few others.

Once MAA shut down, I wasn’t really using it for much other than family, and it wasn’t necessary. We all have other ways of keeping up. Once smart phones became ubiquitous, and group messages with it, it became an afterthought to even look at FB. But one or another of their bits of fuckery made me delete the account. Maybe it was the Cambridge Analytica bullshit, maybe it was something else.

I was never on Twitter. Had an account to try it back when it was fairly new. Didn’t like it, never went back.

Now reddit? That was my thing. Mid length commentary available on niche subjects all in one place? Semi anonymity with the ability to just switch to a different user name if need be to avoid bullshit. If they hadn’t gone apeshit shitting on the users that made reddit worthwhile in the first place, I’d probably still be there. Mind you, I’m actually happier on lemmy, but that’s a separate issue.

Never did Instagram at all. I think maybe my best friend’s husband set me up an account one night so I could follow him, but I never used it, and I had a drink that night, so I’m not even sure if he did, or if it was a joke. In any case, he never sent me any info on the account, and he’d had more than a few drinks, so I doubt he remembers lol.

Honestly, the idea of being that public skeeves me out. Always has. I’ve been careful since I first used the internet, there’s no pictures of me online unless they were put there by someone taking pictures in public and I’m at the edge or whatever. I had one asshole pull some shit back in the day, after I used my real name as a moderator of a small forum. Showed up at my house, and that was all it took for me to never use my real name again, even for the Facebook account I used for games and family.

I really don’t want to have to kill some motherfucker because they have beef over some internet bullshit.

So, yeah, I never really trusted any of it much, so I was a light user at best.

Hell, even under my pen name, I didn’t use social media at all with the corporate stuff. I use Mastodon for that, but it’s a recent thing for me, like right before reddit pulled their shit. I got a burst of people that found copies of my stuff on soulseek, and sent me emails. I figured a Mastodon account would be more convenient for notifying anyone that was interested, and it has been. But I keep that separate from everything else. No links to this account or user name, nor my backup under this name, (though I do have an account for that pen name) nor my one lemmy alt for accessing beehaw without registering there. Never use that one tbh.