I’m writing on that fateful day, 20th January 2025.

I stopped using Twitter more than two years ago, judging then it would only get worse under Musk – and I was sadly proven right.

Today I am ending all association with Meta tools, due to Zuckerberg cosying up with Trump. I have not had an account on WhatsApp for more than 5 years, and was only using Instagram sporadically for a project. But the big one is that my Facebook account – an account I have had since early 2008 – is going to go as well. There are a lot of contacts I pretty much only have there, but I now very seldom log into Facebook and my home feed there is always full of complete and utter trash. Were the user experience pleasant I might have considered staying, but it is not, so I am off.

There is also the wider problem with putting much of our communication on US owned commercial platforms. Look back at the past two years and see where that has left us in Europe.

So that means for me personally no Facebook, no Instagram, no X, no WhatsApp, no TikTok.

So what am I using? And how do you even take these choices?

Bluesky (@jonworth.eu) and Mastodon (@jon@gruene.social) as Twitter replacements. At the time of writing Bluesky has a better quality of political debate, and Mastodon the better apps and the better ethics. I might choose for one or the other eventually, but for now I am using both in parallel. And both are (semi-)decentralised networks, so are better guarded against malevolent takeover that have killed Twitter and are damaging Meta.

Signal (contact me using this form if you want to reach me on Signal) as my main messenger, but then here it gets messy. Many railway communities are on Telegram, and I am aware the ethics of that app are highly questionable – but for the moment I cannot re-create those communities elsewhere. So I have to hold my nose. iMessage (because I am still an Apple user – see below) and Viber are alternatives, used for people not present on Signal.

While I really loathe it, I am still on LinkedIn – mostly because the majority of the railway people I need to stay in touch with for my work are there. It feels like the boosterism of Facebook without the pleasant holiday photos, and with a nasty helping of AI slop, but at least it is not owned by Meta, so for now I will stay.

Beyond all of that I am still – for all its faults – an Apple user (with a M1 MacBook Air and an iPhone 13). I have an efficient workflow with Apple devices, developed over many years, and I am not ready to ditch it. And I am also using some Apple iCloud services – while I am travelling on #CrossBorderRail in particular. I host my own email, use NextCloud as an alternative to Google Docs, DuckDuckGo as an alternative to Google Search. Where I can I use OpenStreetMap, umap, and OpenRailwayMap, but still have not been able to stop using Google Maps entirely.

A small server company in Germany hosts my email for me, and while email notifications from this blog (that’s using the open source self hosted WordPress) are sent with MailChimp, that will be the next commercial service to go – just as soon as I find the time.

That – for the moment – is about as far as I can go.

Don’t get me wrong – not everyone can do this. But because I can do this, I should. For me as a self employed person this is a good deal easier than for someone employed in a large company or institution. And I should do it as far as I possibly can. Where ready alternatives to tools with the wrong ethics exist, use them. Help support other people to use them. But where that is not possible, hold my nose and stick to some unethical tools if I have to.