The Big Unplug?
I actually read the whole thing and it disturbed me. I couldn’t understand why anyone would agree to such terms, so I passed.
Then I started getting Facebook invitation emails from lots of friends in the next few months and eventually, I gave in despite my misgivings about their privacy agreement.
This was in 2008, mind you. MySpace was still a thing — until it wasn’t. The question is, are social media giants of today destined to go the way of MySpace?
These days we are living amongst a generation of people who not only don’t remember MySpace, they have never known a world without social media. It may be hard to fathom for some of us, but there once was no Instagram and one day it too will be gone.
Meta, now the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is reporting losses of $9.4 billion this year and just announced they are laying off 13% of their employees. (Ouch.) Twitter is similarly in a state of free-fall after Elon Musk bought the company and chaos ensued. Users are leaving by the thousands in search of an alternative home for their 280 characters.
Sea Change or Blip?
Are people fed up enough with the social media giants for this to loosen their grip on the market? More than 1 million Twitter accounts have been deactivated since the takeover. It’s hard to believe but Musk even told employees that bankruptcy was a possibility.
Whether users delete their old accounts or just stop engaging with it is another story. I guess that’s the “quiet quitting” of social media, which I did with Facebook a long time ago. I still have an account because most people in Iceland use the messenger to communicate but I’ve come close to deleting the whole thing.
I think this exchange between journalists Katy Tur and Linette Lopez on MSNBC the other day sums up the conflict many of us feel about social media:
Katy Tur: You also have a lot of people who were fired or are resigning that know how to build a social media site, and Twitter’s not the most complicated of the social media algorithms… Could we see a Twitter competitor come in soon?
Linette Lopez: Please. If you think that you can do a Twitter competitor, please do. Please do it now.
Tur: Well, maybe we just get of social media and live our lives and don’t focus on being on the phone and scrolling all day long.
Lopez: Why should we have to give up social media because some billionaire with a mid-life crises is exercising his insecurities on all of us?
Tur: Because social media sucks. Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe this is the break we needed.
Maybe we do need a break but what about the incredibly positive aspects of social media for creators? I’m reminded of the book Show Your Work by Austin Kleon which points out how it can give artists an unprecedented platform for connection. As Linette Lopez expressed, why should we have to give that up?
So what does all this mean for creators?
Many creators are learning the hard way not to put all their eggs in any platform’s basket. I heard this advice years ago and I’d like to say that’s the reason I started my newsletter The Interval, but honestly it was actually just a way to give myself another creative outlet. However, it has turned out to be the best decision I’ve made online as a creator.
It would seem the smart move to diversify and maintain profiles everywhere. In practice, however, unless you have a team working for you (I guess, pretending to be you?) that’s actually way too much work for independent artists. We need to be able to focus on the actual work we’re creating.
We have to make hard choices about where we invest our time and energy and lately the likes of Zuckerburg and Musk have made those decisions a little easier.
I don’t want to seem insensitive to artists who have come to depend on their social media accounts for income. I’m sure it’s upsetting when you’ve steadily built up thousands of followers just to see a lot of them jump ship and climb aboard somewhere else, but we need to be flexible and expect that, in this warp-speed world we live in, disruptions like these will happen.
Less Icky Than TwinstaFace
In contrast to Twitter’s rough patch, the open source Mastodon is gaining new users at a rate of 100,000 a day now. And Vero is on fire with photographers who have been shut out by Instagram’s turn toward “reels” in an effort to compete with TikTok.
For those of you who follow(ed) me on Twitter, you might already know that I’ve opened an account on Vero. I’m just dipping my toes in right now, but I’m very impressed with how it works so far. As far as I can tell, there’s no algorithm and way more features. They even have a dedicated iPad app! (Seriously, there’s still no Instagram for iPad?)
It’s mostly photographers at this point, but I see the potential for all kinds of creators to get back to sharing their work online instead of trying to game out the algorithm.
However, I’ve also recently learned of an open-source photo sharing service called PixelFed which uses the Fediverse like Mastodon to provide a decentralized platform with more privacy, better moderation and more security.
Both Vero and PixelFed would be an upgrade from Instagram but as far as a replacement for Twitter, that’s where Mastodon comes in. And to be scientifically accurate, it doesn’t Tweet… it Toots. (Oh dear.)
Mastodon’s sign-up process is a little confusing but I’m assuming with it’s popularity this will be ironed out. This short video explainer from Matt Birchler would have been helpful to see first.
Wherever You Go, There You Are
I’m not an expert on any of these alternative platforms, but I’m already seeing massive potential in them. Whether creators choose to jump ship and rebuild a following or stick it out on Twinstaface, the future is probably bright for creators. Music critic and tech forecaster Ted Gioia was unusually optimistic in his newsletter last week.
“Most people don’t stop and think about the implications of this. But just ponder what it means when some dude sitting in a basement has ten times as much reach and influence as the New York Times. If you run one of these channels and have any skill in identifying talent, you can launch the next generation of stars.”
Who knows what the future may hold? Certainly, not me.
However, we can’t lose sight of the importance of the connection that these platforms allow. I have had some wonderful experiences on social media, finding likeminded creators and perspectives of people from all over the world that would have never been possible otherwise.
As disillusioned with it as we might be, I don’t think throwing our hands up, deleting our accounts and retreating to our studios is an option. We owe it to ourselves and the world to find a way to sustain that connection one way or another.
