For what it’s worth, I’ve again reached an inflection point with my use of social media.

The Beatles classic “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” opens with “It was twenty years ago today.” In many ways, it was.

Before Facebook, there was LiveJournal; before that, BBS software; and before that, TYMSHARE; and of course, internally at IBM, forums. It was though effectively 21 years ago that Zuckerberg et al. made Facebook a reality. You can read my concerns about Facebook going back at least 13-years. #facebook

There is no doubt that Facebook leaked data before the 2016 General election that gave us Trump the first. As far back as 2013 I was flabbergasted how much information you could glean with simple questions from Facebook’s “social graph”. The UI changes which made it possible went away, the backend function never did. It was core to what became known as the Cambridge Analytica scandal.

I left Facebook in 2017. In 2019, on the 15th anniversary, I was quoted on NPR’s Marketplace about it. Following this week’s announcement by Meta that it was going to drop content moderation in place of a Twitter-style community notes.

I decided I was mostly done with Instagram as well. While I didn’t delete my ID(s), I did remove the app from my phone. I won’t be posting, liking, or generally interacting day to day—not that I’d used it much in the last 5 years. For my project ID, I will post infrequently. The problem with Instagram is it takes time and experience to create compelling content, and really the results don’t make it worth it. So I’m done there as well.

That leaves email, this website, and my other project websites. I also joined Bluesky in my exit from Twitter. You can find me at @markcathcart.com.