Olu Online

leaving

Last updated 2 months, 3 weeks ago

In this series i keep circling back around to social media; i've discussed it in bump/boost, discussion and i guess also in home. i am in some ways tired of thinking about it, and in others feel like i have to keep writing, to work through whatever feelings and thoughts i have1.

everyone is leaving social media! or at least, thinking about leaving. okay, sorry, i should say corporate social media: the facebooks. twitters, instagrams and tiktoks of the online world. you should be on a dopamine detox, taking a digital sabbatical, packing up your virtual bags for a long trip from which you may never digitally return.

a lot of them are still in the long process of leaving, or at least picking the next place, myself included.

i see goodbye posts from long-standing meme pages, 'catch on me bluesky' posts from people on the periphery of friend and acquaintance, 'we no longer can abide by this platform' posts from small businesses. on and on.

being the kind of (extremely online!) person i am, i am constantly looking for a definitive answer to the eternal questions of social media, namely:

one answer to all this is often touted to be setting up a newsletter — not a substack of course — and directly messaging your friends and/or audience, instead of leaving yourself open to capitalist capture, and all manner of other evils. we should create web rings and be free! go back to the blissful trappings of web 1.0; texts, rss and emails or gtfo. maybe a bit of a private, non-meta group chat like discord if you're feeling sassy?

i have a similar feeling about this — the abandoning of the social media "commons2" to the wolves — as i assume people who worry about monogamous marriage feel as the years tick on. it seems like everyone else is slowly pairing off, and when the game of online musical chairs is done, will i have seat? will i like my seat? and how the hell will i find another if i hate it?

some of my discomfort with the big push back to the days of yore is that those days kind of sucked for me online, and i never found a group wandering around on web 2.0. it was better, and i met many kind internet strangers on my travels, but it wasn't as if it was easy. a different problem is related; what happens to everyone who can't or won't leave the communities they've built on gated grounds? there are questions of disabled access, as well as not leaving the joy of the web only to the people who can build on it.

the rest of it is simpler: i don't want to go back! i have no desire to return to relying on word of mouth and personal connections for everything in my life. i don't believe the bits and bytes of the internet in any grand sense have a plan for me - i still need to finish writing that piece about technopaganism that's on my notes site, ugh - but i do think they've allowed me to live a life i love.

to throw myself back to being young, mad and loosey goosey on the internet, though when i was very young a lot of what i was doing was faintly to keenly dangerous, being online saved my life in countless ways. being mad and suicidal was lonely enough, given i and the people in my non-digital life around me had either no idea what was going on or no idea what to do about it. relying on those i knew in offline life wouldn't have helped me.

even without poor mental health in the picture, just meeting people i love and care for through the ones i happen to be placed near or already existed in community with already felt impossible as a young person. being queer would have been even harder if i had to ask questions, flirt with and get information from people i knew afk only too. i'm belabouring the point, and its not the point of this piece, but you get what i mean. if everyone around you is similar, and you are different, relying on them to help you find Weird Things (to them!) is foolhardy.

i don't think relying on people i knew as a teenager to help me curate my future helped me build it, and their projections for me didn't always align with where i hoped, dreamed, or even assumed i would eventually end up.

concrete example, once i realised i wanted to be a software developer and could somehow do it without studying a whole new degree (gasp!) i started searching on Google for examples of people who had done it. i found a site, the only defining feature of which i remember was that it had yellow elements3, vague i know. it informed me i too could become a web developer and earn the princely sum of £25,000 a year if i got my act together. It was way humbler, more encouraging and anti-AI slop sounding than my summary sounds like, but yes, that put the seed in my head. my family were pretty discouraging, my friends were mostly unsupportive, and i had no other role models but people i found online.

but Olu, that's still possible if everyone retreats to their blogs and stuff, right? if things like marginalia search continue to exist then sure, the blog part. however, it was a series of chance encounters in facebook groups, twitter threads, whatsapp groups, and admittedly through ads on the aforementioned corporate web (apparently they actually used to advertise useful events and happenings??), that led me to finding this career.

i think screaming into the abyss and having it actually reply has its place, and i'm not the only one. which leads us to the other answer to the other answer to the question of social media. do it differently this time, invest your time in different platforms, not owned by the big corps of the world!

sadly i'm not sure about that either.

i wish i believed free our feeds/ATProto or mastodon/ActivityPub would actually save the day and make social media feel good for more people. i was stunned, when twitter became x, how many people told me they'd never particularly enjoyed or wanted to be on the platform in the first place. even the ones who did enjoy it were regularly harassed or downtrodden by awful replies. i feel like “people who genuinely enjoyed twitter” was a much smaller group than i imagined, and everyone else felt they had to be on there for their career/memes/the zeitgeist and just bore the difficulties and annoyances.

people's enjoyment of "the town square" aside, i think it's difficult to trust that these platforms will play nicely on the bluesky side — it is VC funded after all — or that the moderator of your instance will not become overwhelmed by the work and expense of running the platform you rely on, or become or reveal themselves to be terrible in the mastodon/ActivityPub world.

i'd love to believe in one silver bullet for all these problems, or that deciding that social media in itself is untenable would actually mean good things would happen. for some reason i think turning away is just leaving the big companies to do as they wish with people who aren't able or willing to leave, whether for reasons of their ongoing, platform encouraged social media addiction or because their livelihoods are at stake? or i guess the ultimate reason; not caring or worrying or hand wringing or even knowing about the consequences of carrying on as we are.

at the same time, i get that actual boycotts do things. starving the big platforms of attention, clicks, ad revenue en masse would be the one thing that would maybe make them change up their policies4, other than like, governments that would actually do something to reign them in.

i really want more people talking about this, including and beyond these two options. what do you want your life online to look like? how do we get there from here? what do you need from your online experiences?

i think i'm going to engage more in places that have active commenting cultures where i can; i crave conversation more than i realise. i know that's not everyone's experience, though, so as always, i want to hear your thoughts.

other resources:

This piece is part of my attempt at Alphabet Superset, a “6-month” creative challenge (I passed a year in September 2024 — with a long break! — and the creator of the challenge hasn’t finished yet either). Other posts so far: abolition, bump, boost, culture, discussion, english, formulaic, gone, home, immortality, jargon, knowledge and monotony.

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  1. we're working it out in the remix, lorde/charli xcx style.↩

  2. yeah yeah, it's not really a commons is it if it's in private hands...↩

  3. i can drive myself insane trying to find resources i loved once, so i have to remind myself i will probably never find this site again with so little information; writing this footnote for said reminder!↩

  4. i don't know how you organise a mass boycott of social media, on social media or off, so i will leave that fight to other people.↩

#alphabet-superset