I know it’s hard to let go of an account that you’ve been curating for years but I think it’s time to send a signal and simply stopping using Twitter isn’t enough. If you still browse but don’t post, that’s even worse. You’ll still be an active user.

Send a signal and deactivate your account today.

Since deactivating my Twitter account and moving to the federated Mastodon I’ve realised that for me at least I have no plans to join any social network owned by a single company. The exception to this rule is Glass, I pay a yearly subscription to use it and that’s ok. I trust the owners and my money means no ads or selling of my data.

If the service is free and I can’t get behind their privacy policy or reason for being then I see no incentive to joining.

I’ve been seeing a lot of people talking about Hive social but after checking their privacy policy it’s a little vague for me right now. It’s not been updated for a year and I’m not confident they actually have anyone on board that is managing the security and privacy of this service.

We value your trust in providing us with your Personal Information, thus we continuously strive to use commercially acceptable means of protecting it.

From Hive social privacy policy

From reading it start to finish it looks like a template taken from somewhere else and just had the company name changed. No actual detail on how it’s being secured (e.g. encrypted at rest?) or where it’s being stored (AWS?).

Personally I’m not jumping on another company owned social media platform just yet.

I’m done, as Captain America once said “I don’t like bullies” and I don’t either. I can’t keep an account on this service that is obviously heading for the toilet and now run by a narcissist with a control problem. It’s time for me to stand by my morals and delete my account for good.

I’ve been thinking about how to write up a post about what Mastodon is from a more non technical perspective and Mastodon have done it for me – check out this video explainer.