Author Archives: Hans Hafner

Leaving Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp)

First of all let me tell you how thankful I am that you made your way to this blog post. It means a great deal to me and I hope that you will stay in contact with me.
It means, that you find my leaving important enough to at least check out why I’m doing it.
I urge you to do the same – and I hope that you get your friends and family to also move to a more healthy and positive surrounding.

If you would like to stay in touch:

I’m putting this first because it’s more important to me that we stay in touch – if you would like to know my reasoning/rambling, read that further below.

Phone: I very much enjoy talking on the phone – if you have my number, please use it – otherwise send me a quick email.

Messenger: Best would be to stay in touch via a private messenger. I use Signal, best to exchange a quick email beforehand… as my phone number is pretty clean of spam it’s not published on this website.

Email: Email is the most free and open communication standard out there – yes, it’s not very private, but at least it works without having to rely on any of the large cloud companies. You can find my mail around here on the site.

Social media – Mastodon: It would be wonderful if you came over and connected on Mastodon:
https://mastodon.social/invite/5TPS8tu4
For very in-depth information on what this is head over to the EFF and read this article
A little easier to read is this article on Lifehacker

A quick note on artists and self-promotion:

I understand that we need to reach an audience as large as possible and that these services make that easily possible. That’s why it would be so good if we collectively made this statement and brought all the well-meaning people (and we are in the huge majority!!) with us to these free (in the sense of freedom, not in the sense of free beer) open solutions to make our world better, instead of giving all of our great energy to the executives and shareholders of Meta, Twitter, etc…

Why I’m leaving all Meta (Facebook) properties.

The main reason is: I don’t want my presence to contribute to Metas financial gain anymore at all.

Social media was such a beautiful thing – it was meant to bring us closer together, but what happened was political devide. With social media companies’ automated and algorithmic information positioning helped destructive forces to divide and conquer the world.
It helped to make Brexit happen.

I’ve stopped actively using Facebook probably about 7 years ago and Twitter about 3 years ago. I no longer want my emotional state to be influenced by any algorithmic timeline. Once you’ve used a service that doesn’t rely on doomscrolling to keep the user engaged you will immediately feel different and you will realize how your emotional state has been affected by someone elses decision about what to show you.

We have just now seen how quickly regime change can happen. If it does happen in Germany, I don’t want my connections and network of people to be in the hands of anybody except me. I have read German history and I know what it means to “round up people” based on some arbitrary attribute.
I want to be out of those databases.

Seeing how quickly tech CEOs buckled at the beginning of the second Tr*!$ administration in 2025 it is clear that I have to move away. My next project is to move my address book and other sensitive data off of iCloud and into a much more private syncing solution… one step at a time. (EDIT: I’ve done this and everything is now hosted on a Nextcloud instance.)

Special note on WhatsApp:

There are many reasons to leave WhatsApp – main ones for me are again that it’s owned by Meta and that spam is rampant on WhatsApp.

EDIT:

Collection of other peoples’ posts about this same topic:

Where are the off ramps?

Phonautograph

Over on Logicuser.de (I’ve been there for more than 20 year…) bitzone posted the audio recordings of Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, a french inventor of the Phonautograph. The raw recordings are available in the video below.

This stimulated my imagination a little bit, so I had to grab the audio and played around with it a little bit to come up with this little piece.

Those recordings let you hear things that are happening more in your head than in the actual recording. So I’m not going to spoil it and write any of the things that I’m hearing in those snippets. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did creating it.

Phonautograph     

 

 

The front page of today’s LA Times featured the headline, “Workers lead the resistance as AI risk emerges.”

The online edition uses the title, “Column: Your boss wants AI to replace you. The writers’ strike shows how to fight back”

From the article…

A big reason that the AI hype machine has been in overdrive, issuing apocalyptic claims about its vast power, is that the companies selling the tools want to make it all feel inevitable — to feel like the future — and have you believe that resisting it is both futile and stupid. Conveniently, most of these discussions eschew questions such as: Whose future? Whose future does AI really serve?
The answer to that is “Big Tech” and, to a lesser degree, “your boss.”
Matt Nicholas, a 30-year-old writer and WGA member, who was all too aware exactly how AI was going to be used by the film and television industry — not to replace writers, but to undermine them.
Too many executives in too many industries, such as entertainment, tech and journalism, recognize generative AI for what it is: an opportunity to wield leverage over already precarious workforces. There’s going to be a long, hard struggle, but it’s one worth fighting.
I liked this post on VI-Control by user JJP so much, I wanted to archive it here.

Opt out of agreements allowing AI to use your music to build more tracks for a production music library

I don’t have music in any of these libraries, so this is not about Envato specifically, it applies to all of them.

I would suggest to opt-out even though I am very well aware that of course it will not stop these type. of companies (or any for that matter) from implementing AI-driven content and catalogs.

But we don’t have to make it too easy for them.

“Composers/musicians using the website @AudioJungle by @envato to sell royalty free music – Envato have ‘updated’ – their T&C’s to **now have AI train on your items that you have authored and uploaded** You are opted in AUTOMATICALLY. Additionally, your items will now be licensed “in perpetuity” becuase an AI cannot ‘forget’ what it has learned. There is no mention of any profit share for authors from AI works derived from authors’ compositions. If you don’t want your items to be trained by AI, you need to remove them from the marketplace by June 1st. There is (currently) no opt-out available. While I appreciate AI is inevitable and some people will be embracing this, the immediacy with which @envato has gone about it while seemingly going against some of their core values is striking. I can’t believe they didn’t give authors a choice, and have only given 20 days notice to find an alternative. For those who might be dependent on income from the site, it puts them in a massive quandary, especially with the lack of time to find an alternate solution. It’s frankly shameful behavior. I’ve had an author account there since 2009 – which I will now remove. It kept me afloat during my early years in the industry. I also reviewed items on the site. This policy change and sudden implementation is disgraceful, and I’m now sorry to have been associated with @audiojungle and @envato in any way.”

Mars in 8K

As much as I appreciate the technical achievement of how we are able to create these images and this footage I have to say:

I love our planet brimming with life everywhere. And I just cannot understand why we destroy it the way we do. We only have this one. There is no other feasible alternative planet for the foreseeable future. Probably even further than that.