No More Meta, No More Social Media
For a good while, I have been pretty unsatisfied with the current status of social media. Instagram is full of mindless content and advertising, Twitter has more bots than actual users, Facebook has been a piece of shit since time immemorial... I have been keeping an account on these platforms just for the sake of it, thinking maybe it'll do some good for friends, relatives and acquaintances, if they ever decide to contact me and whatnot.
The whole concept of social media has derailed anyways, you see people posting their private moments and highlights for the public to see, "influencers" trying to farm engagement by doing whatever stupid shit they can think of so that they could make some easy bucks, countless of scam businesses somehow making up into my feed with their bullshit products, huge echo chambers powered by bots repeating nonsensical stuff to push some sort of agenda, its a circus.
In a quiet afternoon, while checking my WhatsApp messages, I noticed this thing called Meta AI and it somehow ended up in all the groups that I was a member of. It had a huge disclaimer with it saying how its secure and how it cannot read messages and yada yada which tripped all my breakers, why is there a stupid chat bot in my MESSAGING app???? What is the purpose of forcing a stupid LLM between me and the people I am talking to? With this being the final straw, I just deleted my account and left the platform for good. Then I moved on to other Meta products, deleting them one by one. I had quit Twitter before this ordeal already. I do actually use chat bots, don't get me wrong. I just don't want them being forcefully shoved down my throat.
Now the only messaging platform I use is Signal, and otherwise people can still contact me by my phone, or email. I do not plan on continuing to bear with the bullshit of these platforms just so that someone may have just a tiny little bit of more convenience when they try to contact me, and if this enough of a reason for them to stop talking with me, then whose loss is it?
While in the process of cleansing myself from these platforms, I had a thought. Why should I stop there? I was using my Apple account as my mail provider, and Apple wasn't exactly troubled with the amount of spam I get in my inbox, their spam filter is laughable if it even exists. Some time ago, half accidentally and half as a joke, I sent a mail to my friend who was using an icloud.com email, as @THREELETTERAGENCY.gov as the sender. iCloud, upon receiving this stupid mail that lacks DKIM, DMARC, SPF record, advertising itself as THREELETTERAGENCY.gov, said yo this looks legit, and put it under his inbox. I have been using my icloud account since 2012, and it has been in countless breaches due to me being a young idiot and using my mail in every sketchy website, from promises of free hosting to dubious fanmade pokemon games. So with no filtering on sight, I am getting like 15 spam mails daily. While some do get a chuckle out of me by offering a free electric toothbrush, it gets tiring very quickly.
So, I decided to retire this cursed iCloud account, and actually pay for a reputable mail provider. I am not gonna advertise the provider that I use for the moment as I am benchmarking their service, but I effectively migrated to it, using different mail relays for every service that require my email address, to make sure that my original address does not get involved in any sort of breach this time.
Also a funny thing, I recently discovered that some crawler was hogging my bandwidth for a good while, and what do I see? A Meta crawler abusing my gitea instance. ZUCKKKKKKKK.
