To All of my Friends & Associates from Various Platforms —
I appreciate that many of you have recently attempted to recruit me to new social media platforms that have recently launched.
However, I don’t want your invite codes to, well, anywhere that requires invite codes. No, not even to avoid someone else taking my well-established name. No. The platform is now free to join without an invite? Great. I still have no intention to do so.
I have been thinking quite a bit lately about who benefits (financially and politically) from our participation on these platforms, and whether we should really want to be a part of something run by someone who probably shouldn’t be trusted to watch a coat (never mind a laptop) for someone who ran to the restroom at a coffee shop. And all in all, I’m over it.
And that goes across the board. Threads, BlueSky, Spoutible, Post, Hive, CounterSocial, that weird half-baked one with the mauve app (who designs a mauve app?) (update: it’s Cohost, a site so banal I can’t ever remember its name) whatever. I’m trying to strategize disengagement from Meta platforms. I’ve stopped making content for TikTok (though honestly I trust their US CEO more than any of the others). Discord is rapidly losing its shine. I have considered making paid content, but Substack is a Nazi haven, and I haven’t launched on Patreon or Ko-Fi yet because I’d really like to keep my content in my own space instead, and monetizing that (which is distasteful in itself but a needed means of income for a disabled person whose social safety net has abandoned her) is very difficult.
We control our futures, and our choices help craft the future of our society overall. From where I sit, a good future cannot be one in which we remain beholden to anything run by asshole techbros (a gender neutral term, BTW) who can change policies on a whim, lock us out whenever they want, and whose personal politics align with whomever will enrich them the most, which, given the state of the world and capitalism, will never be the good guys.
We can do better, and craft a better world for one another, and we have to make that effort. It would be great if more of you joined me in it.
Amadi