Mastodon


Tom Crawford

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Has anyone here looked into this as an alternative to Facebook?  It is open source and if I understand correctly there is no advertising and they state they are mostly crowd funded. https://joinmastodon.org - click on the "How it works" for a 2 minute video.  

Edit:  After spending about 15 minutes looking at it and a number of posts it seems to me that could be as open to Fake News as Facebook is. And a grand opportunity for subversive groups. No advertising seems to be the only plus.  (I should point out I have never been a Facebook user but my wife is.  Maybe I'm just talking through my . . .)

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I don't use Facebook much but  I am giving serious thought dumping it.  If I do dump it, I don't think that I would look for anything to replace it.  I think the only real safe guards to protect yourself is just don't go on those sites.  The main reason I kept it was for he guild Facebook page and I am finding that I can live without that.

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40 minutes ago, pkinneb said:

Id be interested to know what actually happened not sure I am facebook savvy enough to understand. Other than my name and some photo's what is it they have access too? I have never populated any other data...at least that I am aware of

It is rather interesting everything they can get from you.  If you are interested, go on to your Facebook page and over on the far right there is an arrow pointing down, click on that and go to settings, click on that and on the first page you will see "download a copy of your Facebook data" click on that and they may ask you for your password again.  It will take a little bit but they email a zip file that you can download, open and look through.  Mine was kind of boring because I am not on Facebook that much but still enlightening as to what was there.  Some stuff I do not recall at all but it is there, enough to have me giving second thoughts to being on Facebook.

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before you download your data, where it explains what you'll be downloading there is an "and more..." option. Click on that and look at all the different type of things that they track.  This information - keywords in posts, ads clicked, posts liked or disliked, and more and more, was analyzed against models that predicted how people would react to certain topics or keywords that were helped to push certain points of view.

I don't know why people are surprised.  The marketing and advertising industries have been doing this for years.  It's not that the other company was 'caught', it's just that people didn't like what they did with the data.

as for FB, it looks like as long as there was money to be made they had no problem looking at data as just 'data' and not looking at what could be done with it.

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Thanks guys!! The only thing i was a bit surprised was that my entire contact list from my phone was out there. Other than that nothing to concerning and honestly not even that was to concerning it does explain why I keep seeing "people you may know" for people i worked with decades ago LOL

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2 minutes ago, Mick S said:

Credit card issuers also do the same thing. Shop at high-end retail stores? Plus. Shop at Walmart? Minus.

Well if Lie Nielsen and Bob Marino Festool count I get a lot of pluses if not I'm hosed its all Walmart, HD, and Subway from there :)

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