Social media is broken
Stop the world (wide web). I want to get off.
Social media has been a powerful force in my life. I’ve been able to find voices I would never have otherwise encountered, and ive found comfort in sharing my own experiences with others.
However, with the increasingly dangerous political landscape and the impact we’re seeing on our communities, social media has become a vehicle for bigotry and hate. That rot is spreading across all the major platforms.
This is by no means a new thing. I left Twitter at the end of 2022 when it became clear that the platform was no longer safe. However, I wasn’t naive enough to think that those problems wouldn’t follow us to new spaces - or to ignore that they were already there - but I had more trust in our collective sense of right and wrong.
However, with our rights and freedoms being attacked by the very institutions meant to keep us safe, and social media giants like Meta knowingly using their power to divide, my faith in our collective sense of morality has been eroded.
Whatever your politics, we now live in a world where far-right views are normalised, where a mysoginistic insurrectionist controls the most powerful country in the world, where identities are erased and entire peoples are demonised in the name of national security, and where capitalist megalomaniacs have unchecked influence to shape the cultural landscape.
Trump, Musk, Zuckerberg, Putin and Netanyahu are just the tip of the iceberg. These people have power because our societies are so morally bankrupt that their toxicity has been allowed to fester. While there are local efforts to counter this narrative, the mock outrage of mainstream media is only designed to gain more clicks. Our so-called journalism is deliberately selective: surfacing just the right stories at just the right time to serve the current narrative. Again, this is nothing new but it should be cause for alarm all the same.
It’s in this current climate that one of our main tools of freedom of speech and community building, social media, is being misappropriated to control the narrative and limit our freedoms. The apparent freedom of major social media platforms has always been at the whims of their shareholders, but seeing these tech giants intentionally build harm into their policies is an assault to my values.
Beyond this, i’m painfully aware of just how much time I waste doom-scrolling on my phone. I rarely post on social media, yet I feel compelled to constantly check my social media feeds. There’s a richness to life outside our screens I feel like i’m missing and, quite frankly, i’m just exhausted.
I’d like to completely unplug from social media if I could. However, the reality is social media has become so intricately interwoven with our lives. I remember a time where, if you weren’t on Facebook, you were missing out. I don’t think that’s necessarily still the case with Facebook for me, but it feels like we have to have some form of social media presence to participate in society these days.
Instagram is the only way I keep in touch with certain friends. Facebook is how I stay connected to my extended family. Some loved ones are on WhatsApp, while some use Messenger. Asking people to choose between platforms isn’t really the answer.
Fundamentally, I don’t think a new platform is a solution to the current crisis. A lot of people are moving to Bluesky or Substack. However, I’m wary of yet another supposed safe haven. These platforms are either run by big corporations that will inevitably make changes to suit the bottom line, or they’re grassroots efforts created by idealistic entrepeneurs that simply can’t afford to survive. In the unlikely event they do survive, having a small maintenance presence means limited moderation or the risk of eventually being bought out.
I don’t think the Fediverse is the answer either. The target audience for these platforms remains the more technically inclined, and the user experience on services like Mastodon is clunky. The goals of ownership and free speech are admirable, but the reality is a confusing ecosystem of technologies rather than a single product that just works for most people.
There’s a reason the major social media platforms are popular. Convenience trumps everything when it comes to our online experience. We are all willing to offer up so much of ourselves on the promise of being able to easily connect with each other and share our thoughts and opinions. I don’t think decentralised services are quite there yet in reaching the mainstream. That said, maybe something like Bluesky, a fedirated service that appears a bit more holistic, might be the start of bridging this divide.
Other approaches to social communities like Discord are promising - i’m a member of quite a few - and are a great way to find others with shared interests. However, I don’t think they can fully replace the major social media platforms. For one thing, they don’t have the same serendipidous discoverability that can occur on a platform like Instagram that isn’t tied to a single topic.
Another concern I have is the echo-chamber of voices. This might be fine in my artist and gaming communities, but one of the most valueable aspects of social media is how readily we can communicate across continents, cultures and interests. Substack feels like a place where these concerns are addressed, but a dedicated publication isn't for everyone. I'm much too scatter brained to cultivate such a presence anyway.
All that said, I don’t have an answer, only a feeling that things cannot continue as they are. There has to be a better way.
I can’t switch off my social media accounts right now - and I wouldn’t ask anyone to do the same - but i’d like to take steps towards finding an alternative. I suspect that what I actually need is my own ecosystem of online services, rather than making my home in one place.
As I shared last year, i've been increasingly drawn to the simpler days of the web: personal sites, blogrolls and webrings. I think focusing on establishing my own web presence that I control, first and foremost, and then choosing to use social media strategically is a step towards removing myself from its codependence.
For example, I recently rebuilt this site from the ground up as a self-hosted blog, and I’d like to spin up similar sites for my other interests. I’m currently using Grav, an open source CMS, that provides similar features to Wordpress. Grav provides a simpler approach to alot of the technical hurdles I encountered with static site generators like Hugo and Eleventy. There was nothing inherently wrong with those technogies, but with ultimate flexibility came more skill requirements than I currently have and essentially a distraction from what I wanted to be doing: writing down my thoughts.
I appreciate that not everyone has the luxury of being able to develop or host their own website. I think there remains a place for the managed hosting services like Wordpress, Squarespace and Ghost. However, I knew I wanted a balance between flexibility and maintainability and this is working for me currently. Most importantly, my actual content is highly portable and I can move to a different technology tomorrow if I want.
Social media will still play a part in my online presence for the time being. However, I plan for my websites to be my main online presence. I have an RSS feed and I plan to hopefully enable comments to make it easier for people to engage with my thoughts here. This should hopefully mean more of a transition away from social media over time.