I just deactivated my account on a social media site, and I am angry. I am angry at multiple things.
Was I just another brick in the wall? It depends on your perspective. I have been using the internet for a fairly long time, or as some prefer to say, I have been online for ages. The internet made it possible to connect with people more easily.
Back when I was a child in the stone age, I wrote messages on paper, put the completed message in a folder piece of paper called an envelope, and sealed the envelope. I then wrote a name and an address on the envelope, affixed a stamp to the envelope, and handed the whole thing over to a service called a post office that had its own special building. The stamp was a means by which I could pay the post office for transporting the envelope containing a letter to the person whose address was on the envelope. At this point, some of you young whippersnappers are exhausted at all the effort this must have entailed. We coped quite happily with this method. I have known the thrill of sending and receiving letters – these messages were called letters, by the way – that you can read about in Jane Austen’s book <em>Pride and Prejudice<em> or see in the only P&P movie you need to see – the one with Jennifer Ehle and Colin Firth. That thrill was real.
The internet made such communication faster beyond belief. Fast forward to about 2000, and I began to join various groups or networks online. One such group was a professional technical communication society. We used electronic mailing lists to communicate, and our communities grew and blossomed online because we couldn’t meet IRL (in real life). Why? Because we lived around the world. Several years on, we were discussing ways to develop our community, and how we should be present in other communities where we could gain new members. People were saying all the cool kids were on something called Twitter, but it was mostly people sharing pictures of what they had for breakfast. In November 2008, I opened an account there for one of the sub-communities in this technical communication organisation. A week later, I opened my personal account because I was in love. There were real people talking about all sorts of interesting things like favourite movies or books, or cool science stuff, or amazing things I had never heard of, but needed to know about. People were talking about professional topics, too, like HTML5–which was still on the drawing board, the whole field of technical communication, usability, accessibility, politics, history, and so much more. And, of course, breakfasts. I began to make friend online, but I was also fortunate to meet many of these people in real life. I learned so much from everyone. I have said it before, and I will say it again. Professionally, I learned so much about accessibility, usability, and technical communication from the tweets I read and the people I interacted with in this place. It was continuous education. I was lucky to have had an overall positive experience the whole time I was there, which I guess was do to structuring my interactions within some guidelines I was probably not aware I was following. Maybe my instincts lead me to the right connections, and kept me away from danger zones. Even though I stayed in my own lane, I was very aware there were many, many different types of communities on this Twitter thing. For example, I saw a strong community of disabled people who were educating the world about disability, accessibility, and activism in those areas. I know there were many other groups that were marginalised in society in many ways, but able to find community in this place due to its structure and nature.
It was beautiful, and it was powerful.
In my opinion, it was one of the key tools that helped a lot of people through the first years of the pandemic. The feeling of community I had found back in 2008 continued to be a warm fuzzy. Then 2022 came along, and brought a change of ownership. It felt dramatic. I fled the home I had built for myself on the birdsite, and I went to Mastodon. I had heard about something called Blue Sky, but I hadn’t heard of many people over there, and we humans do like to hang out with our friends. Mastodon was somehow more visible, so I went there. Two-plus years on, and I am happy in my new home. I am a fan of decentralized, federated social network technology!
Why did I even go to Mastodon? Why didn’t I drop all this online community stuff? I think that is a very interesting question. I had become used to the idea of being online. In my early days online, I had transitioned from paper letters to blog posts. Then I had gradually transitioned to these short bursts of 140 characters. I was still connecting to wonderful human beings, and I didn’t want to lose that. In a way, I never needed any of this social media. I had times when I got a bit stressed trying to keep up with news from everyone. There were definitely many moments of drinking from the firehose.
I had forgotten the others drinking from this firehose. The corporations who ran the tools that created the firehoses. I came and stayed for the community (to misquote Drupal), but the corporations wanted me and my data. I thought humanity was connecting – Arab Spring, and all that – but my data was the data of the corporations, as we all did know, but happily forgot. No one made these social media sites so we could all sing kumbaya together. These site were created to make a profit for a select group or a specific individual. I get it. People need to make money to put bread on the table. That is the point of any business in a capitalist society.
I am torn between walking away from these places and staying to make some kind of a statement. I am not yet clear on what that statement is or will be in the places I have not yet left, but in the case of Twitter, or the birdsite, as I now prefer to call it, I am walking away in disgust because there is one individual there who utterly disgusts me. I might be angry in a way at myself for playing along for so long, or continuing to play along in other places that are definitely “for the corporation” and not “for me”. I have also heard disabled people say that it is ableist to leave these communities because not everyone has a choice for multiple reasons. That is probably the strongest argument that keeps me in other places.
I did try to download my data from the birdsite before leaving. I created all that, and I laugh at the idea of someone harvesting it for whatever purposes because there is a lot of the “woke mind virus” in my tweets about black lives definitely mattering, trans lives definitely mattering, enthusiastic book reviews by queer authors, and more of that ilk. I hope their data tools choke on all that. But alas, the download failed completely. I tried three times. I am certain it was intentional. I had around 35,000 tweets covering 14 years. This was supposed to be around 150 MB, but I only ever got the README file. Despite it all being my creations or retweets, I finally realised I would probably never go through them all. That’s still a lot of data, and it would probably gather dust in some virtual attic on my computer. What I did do before I tried this downloading was to screenshot all the people I followed. It was important that I checked who I had connected with during those years. News sites and the like were irrelevant, but I wanted to have the names of the people so I could ensure I connected with them elsewhere. I do know I have many of these connections in other places or in real life, but that was the most important info to me. I deleted names like news sites as I took the screenshots, but my account said I was following 555 people when I deactivated the account today.
My action and this rambling rant were strongly inspired by listening today to Paris Marx in conversation with Chris Gilliard in the Tech Won’t Save Us podcast episode where they discussed “The Problem with Cyberlibertarianism” and “how right-wing politics shaped how we think about the internet”. In the short time that I have been listening to the podcast, I have become a huge fan and a Patreon supporter because the conversations are so necessary and vital now, as well as just plain good.
I’ll close with a beautiful sumi-e picture of a carp swimming up a waterfall by Utagawa Hiroshige (1797–1858) from the Public Domain Image Archive that can spare you the pain of ever using any AI-generated enshittified images again. Peace!
You perfectly summed up my experience, too, Karen. Thank you for that. Unfortunately, until my local emergency services people have their own app (they’ve told me it will be ‘soon’), I will still maintain my account there, purely because it’s the easiest way for me to get current info on bushfires in my area. I look at nothing else on that site and now that they’ve hidden Tweetdeck behind their paywall, I don’t see the tweets of anyone I’m not following. The firehose of info has dwindled to a trickle, which is just from the emergency services people—everyone else I know and respect has moved. I’m also on Mastodon and BlueSky, and while both have their positives and negatives, it’s just not quite the same as the birdsite of old, pre-2022.
Thanks for your comments, Rhonda. You remind me of one of the aspects of sticking around like an ally – emergencies services. Everyone needs them, and they really don’t exist or they functional poorly outside of a service just like this. A short messaging service for all suits emergency services perfectly. An era has really ended here. Only time will tell if that is OK. Sometimes eras must end, and some new is needed, but the way this one ended was in a destructive way, and that is what angers me. Sigh.