Social Media

Consolidation and Decentralization

Categories: [Tech Notes]
Tags: [Social Media], [ActivePub], [Fediverse]

Social media is a necessary evil if you operate a business, especially one in the music industry. I have at least four active accounts, a pair of FB accounts; and a pair of IG accounts. Personal and Business. Oh yeah, Twitter (now X), Threads, Reddit. I also have at least one other FB account that I've lost the keys to. Speaking of lost access, there's also a Myspace account somewhere out there, and even a Live Journal if those communities even exist anymore. So much digital exhaust—and they're quick to lock you out if you get your credentials wrong, or even hit reload on the login page a couple times. I think the social media companies want it that way, there's no human escalation path for support—they want you to lose access to your information—so it can be theirs to monetize and sell (or lease) to third parties for all time. That is one of the dangers of these walled-gardens. Nobody reads the fine print anymore, because there are just too many services people use for every day life. Too many to monitor.

Mastodon

I think I will be switching to Mastodon pretty soon, free software running on a shared network protocol. There is no single company that owns all the data.

Social Media Consolidation

I will be requesting my data and closing my Meta accounts soon. For now, here are the social media accounts that I own and still check occasionally. Not linking them—but you can type them in if you really want to go there.

Personal Accounts

FB: @lgnbyrn
IG: @lgnbyrn

The Panama Sound footprint

FB: @panamasound
IG: @panama.sound

I might keep my Panama Sound IG for announcements, live posts and BTS stuff, but I think I'm going to close the other three soon.

Updates

2026-08-21 02:32 Signed up for Mastodon.

So I've created a Mastodon account. https://mastodon.social/@lbyrne. God, I don't know man. I've been poking around the site and it's weird, the navigation feels different somehow. I guess you're not being spoonfed stuff from an algorithm. You have to make decisions about the content that you want to see. It's early days, and I just have one post. I feel the wind blowing and watch the tumbleweeds bounce along. Am I dooming myself to this platform? Will it get better with more customization on my part? Or more adoption on the world's part? I'm pretty patient with technological stuff. We shall see.

I've also got a pending membership at musician.social for Panama Sound… the address when it's approved: https://musician.social/@panamasound.

Well, I gotta say that it's kinda cool that you can create multiple accounts on different servers with the same email address. Each server has it's own local flavor.

LiveJournal and the Russian Federation

Well, I found out what happened to LiveJournal—it was bought out by a Russian company and is now subject to the laws of the Russian Federation. They talk a lot about ethyl-alcohol in those terms. Interesting.