Goodbye Meta // Goodbye Meta

January 28, 2025

After a week of being off the grid following the Lights Out Meta call, I'm organizing the migration from Island to Mastodon and Pixelfed.

Is there any need to specify the reasons? Probably a little, as the movement remains modest in relation to the issues at stake.

Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and their accomplices are only as powerful as we grant them, by letting them commercialize our personal data and decide for us what we watch. Seeing them appear alongside Trump should come as no surprise.

BlueSky, much talked about in the mainstream press, is a fast-growing commercial company founded by a libertarian. He left the company, but its model is no different from that of the GAFAM, which has claimed a near monopoly on global chatter.

Conversely, Mastodon is open-source software that isn't backed by a commercial company. It's a (growing) network of 10,000 independent instances (servers) that interact and currently have 1 million users. But it limits text to 500 characters, which doesn't match the somewhat structured content sharing I started with Ísland; so I'm going to test its use for a while.

Closer to Instagram, Pixelfed allows you to publish longer texts. So, in principle, it's the tool I'll be favoring, but again, let's test it out.

These two applications are connected to the Fediverse, a free software network using the common ActivityPub protocol. No sale of personal data, no obscure and manipulable algorithms, no shareholders to fatten.

Obviously, the interfaces of these tools are currently more basic than those of Facebook or Instagram (to only mention those I know), but, apart from the fact that the overabundance of functionalities is not a guarantee of quality of exchanges, the more contributions there are, the more developments will follow.

Aware that these changes take a little time, but that we have waited too long, so as not to lose everyone along the way I am not immediately closing Ísland's Instagram and Facebook accounts but I will only publish the bare minimum, namely announcements of exhibitions and meetings.

All news articles, record reviews, and new release presentations will now be exclusively on Mastodon and Pixelfed.

And of course, first and foremost on the website because another life – without social networks – is possible.

Find Island
On Pixelfed https://pixelfed.fr/@Island
On Mastodon https://mastodon.social/@galerie_island

Learn more

On the Fediverse

On Pixelfed

On Mastodon