My goal is to post my skateboarding material - pictures, writing, videos, and podcasts, here and here only (though my long-running blog, concretelunch.info, will still have some). My point - I fucking hate Facebook and Instagram. They have been become annoyingly full of AI generated shit, but really they were becoming horrible for a long time before the AI onslaught.

I’ve met a lot of good people on Facebook. It is a shame that money ruins everything. I’m not “leaving Facebook and Instagram”. I’m just not feeding the beast with my own work anymore. I also don’t post anything to YouTube.

It is my contention that we were better off before, with small message forums, blogs, static web pages, and email. The promise of big social media has been eclipsed by the inherent problems “when things get too big.”

I’m rambling. Maybe bullet points would be better…

• Everyone should own their web space and their creative output
• I am doing everything I can to prevent my own meager creative output from being scraped by AIs
• While I know not everyone can do this, I prefer to pay for web-services. If I pay, then I’m a customer and can have some expections. If I don’t, then I am in fact the product and have no rights. That’s why I pay for micro.blog, blog hosting on dreamhost.com, and video hosting on vimeo.com
• As much as I can, I’m posting things to one of my micro.blog accounts, and federating them elsewhere

This all might seem silly, but social media has moved from being a fun distraction to be a major social force.