I was looking for somewhere to post something I’d done in Ardour on Facebook and couldn’t find anywhere Ardour. So I set up a group for chit chat, show and tell and so on and so forth…
The Ardour DAW Stop
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So… let’s make it!!!
Why does there have to be one?
There’s a community here.
Cheers,
Keith
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Haha!
I think this is one area where I would guess there would be a notable difference of opinion between the Open Source enthusiast Linux Ardour camp and the Windows and MacOS Users. It’s an interesting thing to observe, I don’t have a dog in this fight nor a strong opinion, I got off Social Media years ago for a variety of personal reasons but I completely see why there might be interest in having that sort of presence.
On a related side note It is a fact that it is good for promotion to have a strong Social Media presence and I have to say that promoting bands, album releases, shows and more recently crowd-funded ticket events without it is next to impossible…
Main objection (as usual): Information will be scattered around and more difficult to find. Facebook stuff is usually not findable via search engines.
Also, Facebook is not free.
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Extrapolating … Ardour will be on TikTok in 2037 
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Followed by a big uptake in usage of Ardour amongst Chinese Government agents…
Cheers,
Keith
Do people still use Facebook?
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I guess someone uses it. But If it wasn’t a nice place there is MeWe
I created a group there if you happen to visit there.
There’s a bunch of LinuxAudio and Ardour users in the Fediverse. 
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Are you people young enough not to have started your social media lives on Facebook and Twitter? I would like to ween myself off them. They’re a bad habit, I know.
You don’t ween yourself off of them. Just give your contact details to people you want to keep in contact with still and delete the account.
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I started my online social media on forums like this one and some other fledgling services (Friends Reunited, anyone from the UK?).
Facebook and Twitter came along, basically, at the right time to capture the market. I was an early adopter of both.
Twitter was limited and difficult to use (limited text, difficult to have real conversations, but occasionally useful). I still have an account,. officially, but I’ve never really used it that much. And since Elon took over, and it became a mess, I think it’s just a matter of time before I delete my “X” account.
Facebook was pretty dreadful from the start: I remember in the early days it was highly gamified with things like zombies Vs werewolves (trying to recruit friends to your side), virtual gifting, or throwing virtual cups of unpleasant substances at each other, and so on. But it showed promise as a way of keeping in touch with the demise of other platforms.
In reality, they were good at making it addictive and “sticky”, even though better platforms like Google+ competed with them for a while.
By the way, my personal view is G+ failed because they had a more privacy-first approach which made people think that it was (to use the presses favourite phrase) a “ghost town” when, in fact, there was a lot of activity there if you knew where to look. But, by design, it just wasn’t as addictive. That was a good thing, but people didn’t realise it at the time.
The other problem was that people had already built up their connections in Facebook, and expected all of those connections to instantly be in G+. Plus the mainstream press had their knives out for G+ from the start (I remember the first use of “ghost town” in the press was before G+ got out of invite only beta).
The Fediverse is suffering from the same effects, although the drivers for the Fediverse are different, so it doesn’t actually matter. Longer term, I think the Fediverse is a better bet than any centrally run social network.
For my part, I went cold turkey and deleted my Facebook account several years ago. I had two drivers: one was when I realised how much of my life I was wasting by “doom-scrolling” through FB.
The other was the Cambridge Analytical scandal. I was becoming aware of how much Facebook were willing to sell information to political groups and to enable them to use that to do shadow political advertising to influence political views (often illegally) before the CA scandal broke.
When it did, it was the straw on the camels back for me. I refuse to be part of something that is so politically corrupt. And if anyone believes the official FB line that it was “by accident”, I have a bridge to sell you.
Since then, I have seen no sign that Meta can be trusted (and plenty that they cannot).
And, yes, whilst there’s a period of FOMO after leaving these platforms, eventually that gives way to a feeling of being in more control of your life.
And if I want community around a given subject, there’s usually a forum like this one where I can converse with people with the same interests in a focussed way, without being distracted by cat photos, narcissistic selfies, and political memes designed to divide society.
YMMV
Cheers,
Keith
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Great reply, Keith. Thanks. I became hooked on the idea of the internet being a great power for good - bringing people together and enlightening all of us quite early on. I even ran a bulletin board for a few years based on a Perl script that you could upload to a server and hack for your own purposes. I updated it to PHP then helped out with a few other people’s web site scripts. I sidestepped Friends United and didn’t immediately sign up to Facebook but eventually got sucked in along with everyone else. The short-form nature of Twitter made it an exciting way to reach out to a lot of people without much effort. Sadly, I think that that’s the very reason why Elon Musk has assimilated it into his efforts for saving the planet for his cyrogenically preserved remains at all costs - all costs for us and not for him. I will probably stay with Facebook for a while because of the contacts I have there. It’s a constant effort not to feel like it’s sucking my brains out through my eyeballs, though. Twitter, these days, is mostly too vile for that to be a problem.
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Yep, heartily agree!
That was the last straw for me, and the realization that they were willfully hacking our dopamine responses and essentially employing constructive addiction techniques… Shameful!
On the other hand, like any addiction people are on a spectrum and some people have no problem keeping their usage of Social Media under control so one really can’t say for anyone but themselves. Sadly there are many sheep among the wolves being preyed on by the opportunistic techniques employed by these companies. I think at some point the pendulum will swing the other way (I think it already is starting to) and people are slowly waking up to a multitude of falsehoods that have been beamed at us in political, dietary, pharmaceutical, and technological realms. The older I get the less I know for certain except that almost nothing is as it seems…(except Ardour of course!)
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