An Ethical, Human Place for People

One person’s journey towards social media freedom

We recently received this email from a person looking to join our early adopter program. With their permission, we are re-publishing it.

I am an over 50 male with ADHD and Dysthymia, who, after a 13 year “career” in tech support, burned out and hit the ground hard. IT/tech support was not my passion.

It was a way to make a living, but I was quickly getting tired of pursuing a field I had no heart for.

You see, my passion was open source and FOSS. I get this excitement when I help a friend convert their laptop/desktop PC to Linux, or share a new service or app. There were times when I recommended open source solutions to my various employers during my tech career, but my ideas would be shot down for one reason or another. Eventually, I just stopped raising my hands whenever I heard the phrase “Suggestions?”

Flash forward to 11/8/2019. I deleted my Facebook account after my growing disgust with what Facebook had been all along. I was done with being click labor for Mark Zuckerberg.Every “like” or share was training their algorithms, and helping them sell ads.

Not only that, but how Zuckerberg had started courting the current White House for fear of maybe actually being held accountable for being a social manipulation tool and selling our data to the highest bidder.

My goal is to eventually free myself of the major tech services I currently use: Google, Twitter, and Microsoft.I want to try ALL the things. One of the strengths of ADHD is how it makes us advocates of what we are passionate about.

I am about the future of federated/decentralised networks. I am about new ideas, and making new connections with people who also enjoy this technology. I’d love to be part of something like Peer so I can put my super power of insight to use for the team. That’s another benefit of having an ADHD mind: You tend to look at things from different angles than everybody else. You ask the questions nobody is asking, or didn’t think to ask. I’m not a coder by any stretch, but maybe I can help Peer with my insight.

Recently, I started a blog. I have been writing about my moving away from corporate social media to something more human and ethical. My hope is that by becoming an early adopter of Peer, that we can help create that more ethical, humane place for people to come to when they tire of being the product.