Surveillance capitalism

That's one reason why I don't use popular social media as much as I used to.

Sites owned by Google, Meta, X, and others collect user information, like behavior patterns and user interests. They use this information to keep feeding you information you are most likely to be interested in. Sounds nice, so far, right? 

Wait until you learn what they do to that information.

They can sell it to others who can use the information to package something you don't like with something you like, making you open to that thing you don't like. As you get more and more exposed to it, you'll start to question yourself if your not liking it was even valid.

Example: You like stand-up comedy. You don't like sexist jokes.

Posts on stand-up comedy get pushed into your feed. The sites test how you react to different levels/kinds of sexist jokes. Maybe you're a person of color, so jokes on dumb blondes don't affect you as much. Since the dumb blonde jokes are packaged with other jokes, you like the post. Maybe you're from the working class, so you like a content with a joke on privileged clueless women, regardless of their race.  It has other LOL jokes, so you hit the heart icon. The sites can run different tests on you and eventually you might realize that some women deserve to be laughed at.

They split hair with your value system and find ways to control you. They affect your purchasing behavior. (You didn't buy the last doll if you haven't seen it in some social media content.) They affect how you choose your government leaders.  They desensitize you, or worse, make you oblivious to on-going war crimes.

Fediverse: The Alternative

Recently, I discovered the decentralized social media sites. How do I describe it? It's like X but all other letters are involved (for illustration purposes: A to Z). Y registered users can interact with the posts from A to Z sites(aka server, aka instance). Y users don't have to make an account on the other sites as long as the other sites are federated with the Y site. 

The cool thing is that any person with enough programming skills and material resources can set up a site. The sad thing is that a malicious character can do the same and set up a malicious site. The good thing is that any site can defederate from the problematic sites, meaning the problematic sites cannot access the other sites. The best thing is not one entity/corporation is in control of all the data and user information.

Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter/X, while PixelFed is an alternative to Instagram. Everything in the fediverse is in the early stage, lacking other features from popular sites. Aside from the confusing initial choice of server/site in which to set up an account, there is also the initial lack of feed since it's hard to find a sub-niche interest in an already niche set-up. Once you find and interact with people having the same interests as you, you'll get the ball rolling.

I'm just glad that there's an alternative to the popular social media sites. For now, most of my doll posts will be in the fediverse.

Here's a glimpse of a doll content from a Mastodon intance of the fediverse.