I used to post here and there on Tumblr from an old blog I tried to keep up (I admit I sucked at posting constantly and eventually dropped off all together), but Facebook for me was a social site I used consistently for a long time. Facebook has been a nice and easy way to share things, which is clearly the reason so many people from so many different backgrounds choose to use it.
Despite using Facebook as my primary social media outlet, I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with it, and over the past year with continuing data privacy concerns, it turned more and more to a hate relationship… with little to no love. A few months ago, I deactivated my account. Zuckerberg has always freaked me out (just as a person in general), but the data breach with Cambridge Analytics and Russia and the US election sealed the deal for me. Especially since this isn’t the first time Facebook has questionably handled users’ information or permitted posts of countless false news articles with sensationalist headlines (and yes, this happened before Trump ever said the words “fake news”).
Plus, with all the algorithms and crappy ads, I wasn’t seeing things that made me smile anymore. In fact, when I selected my reason for deactivating Facebook as “Other” and was forced to elaborate in a comment, I wrote: “Facebook no longer brings me any joy.”
But at the same time, I miss the platform that Facebook is. I miss sharing my random blurbs of creative writing with the network there I had established, creating online photo albums easily accessible for friends and family, posting favorite quotes and jokes, reposting what others have shared that I found particularly thought-provoking or poignant, etc.
I am still using Instagram, but as that is part of Facebook aside from the fact it’s only really meant as a photo-sharing platform, I wanted to search for something to hit more of the bases while still offering some degree of data privacy. Google Plus seems to me like the lesser of the two evils when compared to Facebook. They haven’t been called out publicly like Facebook has but there’s something about Google’s ubiquity makes me nervous. Twitter of course you have the character limit which defeats a lot of the purpose of what I’m looking for. Reddit it more of a conversational/commenting site, which I don’t hate, but I am looking for something a bit more conducive to multimedia posting. I’ve looked a bit into Mastodon, but there’s a ton of reasons I don’t think it would be a good fit for me, not to mention they aren’t taking new members on their main page right now. (I should add, if you are reading this and have any suggestions, I am certainly open to them!)
If you are someone who uses anything on the Internet, you’ve probably been getting bombarded with emails and notices regarding updates to privacy policies for sites due to the GDPR in Europe, so I will say my search for finding the privacy policies has been a lot easier than it would have been and they are also (for the most part) a lot easier to understand than they were even just a few months ago at least. In any case, after looking into and thinking about quite a few different alternatives, I landed here.
So here I am. It definitely isn’t perfect (sorry Tumblr, no offense meant), but I think it might be the best platform to create and consume the multimedia type of content I’d like to, at least for the time being. The information Tumblr collects according to its privacy policy, seems to primarily be more generic and less identifying than Facebook (if you haven’t read Tumblr’s privacy policy yet, you can find it here: https://www.tumblr.com/privacy/en), particularly geared towards collecting information for advertising purposes (which I see everywhere anyway, so this isn’t a massive concern for me - definitely a legitimate concern for others I’m sure) and user experience. Then again, I’m sure Facebook claims a lot of their data is used to enhance “user experience”... so much so that I am no longer a user I guess! Essentially for the time being, Tumblr is sufficient for what I’m looking for, but things change fast around here!
Just like with any social media site, their data policy may change, their interface may change - basically there are a ton of reasons why, in the future, Tumblr may no longer be good for me. I think I’ve finally realized that I am searching for what I would call a “safe sharing space” on the internet, and in the end, I’ve realized that what I am searching for doesn’t exist. The GDPR was a huge step forward for data privacy, but as a US citizen, I’m not going to celebrate it too much. Until the law can keep the pace with the technological leaps made not only in terms of information sharing on the World Wide Web, but with in all sorts of other fields (like AI, Robotics, Gene Engineering, just to name a few), then we are in for an interesting future.
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