# Improve Your Social Media Experience with these Four Weird Tricks!

# Improve Your Social Media Experience with these Four Weird Tricks!

August 19, 2017 · 4 minute read

Posted in: computing social

Based on about six months away from Facebook and on [Mastodon][mst], I've had
some thoughts on improving your social media experience. There are a lot of
common pieces of advice (turn off notifications, disable Facebook timeline with
a browser extension) which I am not going to repeat. I hope the advice I'm
offering is more novel (if not totally).



1. **Curate** your social media experience by unfriending, unfollowing,
blocking, and muting people. Different platforms offer more tools, some more
than others. A negative social media interaction can spoil your mood for the
whole day and affect your productivity and health. But on the whole, social
media is not very important. So the benefits of blocking are high, and the
costs are low. You should feel free to block anyone for any reason, or no
reason, and not feel bad about it, or feel like you have to explain it to
anyone.

Basically, your *minimum* goal is to not see their content on your timeline.
If you have a negative interaction with a stranger or acquaintance, you might
want to block them, so that they cannot interact with them at all, or at a
minimum *unfriend* them (Facebook) so that you do not see them on your
timeline, and they cannot see your friends-only posts. For a friend or family
member, you may wish to *unfollow* (Facebook) or *mute* (Mastodon), so that
their posts do not appear on your timeline, but they don't get any indication
that you are avoiding them.

2. **Separate** your different social identities. You may not want everyone to
see your political posts, or your party posts, or your religious posts, for
example. (Note! This is for the convenience and pleasure of your readers,
*not* for privacy. See following item.) Different platforms offer different
ways to do this.

On Twitter or Mastodon, the best way is to have multiple accounts for
different purposes. On Mastodon, those accounts may even be on different
servers. Then when you post or share something, choose which account you want
to post from. This is helped by having a multi-account client like
[Twidere][tw] or [Subway Tooter][st].

There are a couple-three ways on Facebook. You're not supposed to have
multiple accounts, as they'll delete fake name accounts, but you can probably
get away with it. Another way is to use the list feature to choose who can
see each post. This way probably has the best outcome, but is hard to
remember to use consistently. And the final way is to make a page. This is
good because it provides some level of pseudonymity, but then you also have
to try to get all of your friends that you want to see it to like it, which
is hard.

3. **Remember** that everything is public. Yes, even private things are public.

All of the major social platforms have various privacy settings, but you
should not depend on them.

On any of the main platforms, *at least* the site administrators (employees
of the company, for Facebook and Twitter; your instance admin and possibly
moderators for Mastodon) can read anything you post, no matter what the
privacy settings. And every platform also has other potentials for leaks.
Notably, Facebook changes its privacy settings in unpredictable ways every
year or two, privacy in Twitter is a second-class feature, and Mastodon may
strip privacy metadata when federating with older GNU Social or StatusNet
instances.

And, finally, there is always the "analog hole". Put simply, even if someone
cannot share something you've written, or cannot share it in a way that
other people can see, they *can* take a screenshot and share that. And
there's basically no way to prevent this.

If you have something to discuss that's really private, you need [end-to-end
encryption][e2e]. Mostly, this is not something you will find in social
platforms. Currently, it is mainly in secure messaging apps like
[Signal][sn], [Wire][wire], or [Conversations][csv]. And it is also
appearing in group chatroom apps like [Riot][riot]. There are experimental
social media apps like [Patchwork][pw], but they are not really ready for
ordiary users.

Basically, you should follow the advice of Depeche Mode: [You had someething
to hide; should have hidden it, shouldn't you.][dpm] Tell what you have to
tell, and hide what you have to hide.

<iframe width="560" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/M2VBmHOYpV8?ecver=1" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

4. **Own** your content. Post things on a site you own (typically a blog), then
share it to Facebook, Twitter, or wherever. This has advantages for both you
and the health of the Internet. But the main advantage for you is that the
content *you* created is not trapped in some corporate silo. If Twitter goes
out of business, or bans you for not using your deadname, you still have
everything you posted. This principle is called [POSSE][posse]: Post (on
your) Own Site; Syndicate Elsewhere. It's not really easy enough for
everyone to do yet, but we're making it easier! For now, if you can't run
your own blog, think about what small steps you can make in this direction.

And that's it! I hope you find these ideas useful and helpful.

[mst]: https://joinmastodon.org/
[posse]: http://indieweb.org/POSSE
[tw]:https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=org.mariotaku.twidere
[st]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=jp.juggler.subwaytooter
[e2e]: https://www.wired.com/2014/11/hacker-lexicon-end-to-end-encryption/
[sn]: https://whispersystems.org/
[wire]:https://wire.com/
[csv]: https://conversations.im/
[riot]: https://riot.im/
[pw]: https://www.scuttlebutt.nz/
[dpm]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2VBmHOYpV8