Today Mark Zuckerberg announced that Meta is bending the knee to the incoming Trump administration, doing away with their third-party fact checking program which kept watch over misinformation on their platforms (to dubious success, admittedly). He claimed this announcement was about free expression, but make no mistake: this is about capitulating in advance to the demands of Trump and the far right, who have fought for years against any attempt to label their lies as misinformation.

The changes Zuckerberg announced today—including removing "restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse" (read: allowing xenophobic and anti-trans hate speech to flow free), and bizarrely moving their trust and safety team from California to Texas, as if one state is somehow magically less biased than another—are going to make Meta's already terrible platforms much, much worse.

And I'm not going to play a part in it. I'm done with Threads.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I left the platform because I didn't want to lend legitimacy to his shitty machinations on a platform I loved. Leaving Twitter back in 2022 was hard and lonely. Leaving Threads is not.

Launched as a Twitter alternative in 2023, Threads grew quickly, built on the back of Instagram's social graph. And while it was fine it was never particularly good. It featured an overly-aggressive algorithm that shoved useless "gas leak" content into your feed all the time, making finding posts from your actual friends difficult and anything actually timely nearly impossible.

Bluesky and Mastodon have always been more engaging than Threads and with the mass exodus from Twitter after the election (what took you so long), Bluesky especially has been downright fun the last few months. That they are also built on open protocols means that there's more flexibility and less of a threat of a single meglomaniac tanking the platforms (this is especially true for Mastodon, a truly open network and will become more likely with Bluesky as the AT protocol grows). So I'm going to stick with those (I had, up until today, been active on all three), find me on either.

Meta is, of course, not just Threads. It's Facebook and Instagram and Oculus and WhatsApp too, all much, much larger than Threads and, thusly, harder to fully extract from. I left Facebook so long ago I don't actually remember when it was (2010 maybe?), but Instagram I am begrudgingly staying connected to for now because there really is no viable alternative. Which sucks, absolutely, and will be a decision I revisit probably sooner than later.

"Why do I stay and when will I go?" are questions we should all be asking ourselves now. Find the lines you won't cross.

In the months since the election, every major tech company executive has made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring of Donald Trump. It's not just Meta, not by a lot. Amazon, Apple, Uber, OpenAI, the list goes on and on. At this point trying to extract yourself from all of the companies that have bent the knee to Trump would involve extracting yourself from most of the internet (not the worst idea in the world, but not particularly practical). But it's important to know where your lines are drawn because the coming months are going to be a challenge and knowing where you stand is going to be crucial.

So goodbye Threads, you were never very good. And fuck you, Mark Zuckerberg, neither were you.