I gave up on corporate-owned “social media” a few years ago, and have never regretted the decision for a moment.
It was easier for me, though, because I’m a blogger. I have my blog on a self-hosted WordPress site. WordPress is an open-source nonprofit organization. While it has a management team, it is owned by its users. It’s not perfect, but when I write stuff, I control what appears (and doesn’t appear) on my site, not some greedy US tech corporation. The content of my site is not monitored and parsed by the owners of the technology it’s built on, and then resold to corporate and security interests. I have never made a penny from my blog in 23 years, and am beholden to no one on what does and does not appear in it.
Maintaining a blog is not as easy as maintaining a page on a corporate-owned “social media’ site like FarceBook. And of course my blog has far fewer easy-to-reach potential readers than a FarceBook page can offer.
But what if some altruistic open-source, non-profit group, like the ones that set up much of the early internet before the corporatists enshittified and largely destroyed it, were to set up a global ‘blogging+’ platform where all you needed to do to get your own, privately-managed and controlled blog, was to verify that you’re not a bot, and pick a unique name for your blog. You could host it on your own domain, or you could choose to let the non-profit host it for you, for some modest cost.
The key here is that you wouldn’t have to persuade everyone on your contact list to stop using Farcebook and start using (and move all their posts to) some alternative like BlueSky. Your new un-enshittified blog URL and its companion email and text messaging address would let anyone (by simply clicking a ‘subscribe’ button) see everything you’ve made public, and allow them to respond to it, publicly or privately (unless you’ve blocked them). And if there are certain people you want to track regularly, you could just click to subscribe to an RSS feed of their blog, and your RSS ‘newspaper’ page showing the latest posts from each of those special people (and also from any ‘news’ sources you regularly follow) would also reside on your blog.
No reason why your new blog couldn’t also house your photos and videos as well, in separately subscribable feeds.
When it comes to just about all your online time, then, it would be spent maintaining your own blog and jumping back and forth to the ‘sister’ blogs of those people and groups you care about. It would allow for no advertising, no spamming, no ‘ranking’ of crap people are trying to sell you ahead of the stuff you actually want to see, and no surveillance sold to the highest bidder. You could carry on ‘conversations’ much more dynamically than the horrifically-designed Farcebook messaging and threads applications allow. And those conversations could be completely integrated with your email and text browser pages. No more proprietary apps to have to use and escape from. Self-professed ‘influencers’ and ‘content providers’ would be wiped out. AI slop couldn’t get through.
In a sentence: You’d control what you do and do not see, and you’d control who sees it and who cannot see it. Like you used to do when you wrote letters and subscribed to favourite magazines, remember?
What would you lose? Unsolicited posts, ads, clickbait and spam (ie junk mail). The ability to become ‘famous’ by getting millions of bots to ‘like’ you so your own unsolicited opinions get high rank in enshittified “social media” like Farcebook and Xwitter and hence regurgitated to millions of people you don’t know (ie ego gratification). Small price to pay, I think.
I don’t pretend to be a tech expert, and I’m sure there are flaws in this idea, but I can’t believe they’re insuperable. At this point, if we hope to save the internet as being a usable resource for anything other than AI bots, we’re going to have to learn to work around the slop and enshittification, and build non-capitalistic, non-‘monetized’ alternatives that actually provide the information and services we value. In short, we have to apply the same kind of thinking that produced the internet in the first place.
Not a big deal to me, at least not so far. I have a blog that works well enough. I have an RSS feed that sends me what I know I want to see and nothing else. I use email, with workarounds for its enshittified aspects, and texts, phone (‘the phone’, not phone ‘apps’) and videoconferencing when (and only when) those media are optimal for specific communications. Good enough.
I feel for all the poor souls who are drowning in spam, slop, hype and misinformation because they never learned to set up information and communication systems and protocols that work specifically for them. They must feel like they’re at the mercy of a million rage-baiting, attention-craving ghouls hammering on their front doors 24/7.
. . . .
And if you really feel you have to use clunky, enshittified, ad-filled tech tools that corporations use to sell you (ie you, the product) to their real customers (advertisers and surveillance organizations), here’s a site that will at least offer you some less disgusting alternatives.
image by AI; my own prompt
