Discussion
Many of us have left the big social media platforms; far more of us *wish* we could leave them; and even those of us who've escaped from Facebook/Insta and Twitter still spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to get the people we care about off of them, too.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/20/capitalist-unrealism/#praxis
1/
Friends don’t let friends use Facebook.
Dr. King did it without social media and with the media of the time fully against him. So we need to go back and re-learn the lessons from the civil rights movement.
Yes, changing social media will offer some obstacles, but massive and successful protests happened before the Internet and social media existed. Seems incredible now. The 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Justice surpassed 200,000 and was organized by telephone and in person conversations by Bayard Rustin and team. When certain social media outlets are captured or compromised as organizing tools, the organizing will move to other tools, including texts and (shudder) phone calls.
I'm deleting all Meta platforms for at least a week. And I'm looking forward to the attention span I get back from just focusing on the Fediverse and real life.
LB: I think I agree with everything @pluralistic says here. Every time I got to a "but..." [finger raised] place, he either addressed it or went in a different direction than I was expecting.
This also answers my own question about "why not Mastodon?", also asked by many others.
My only question now is "can I get hired to work on this..."
It's lazy and easy to think that our friends who are stuck on legacy platforms run by Zuckerberg and Musk lack the self-discipline to wean themselves off of these services, or lack the perspective to understand why it's so urgent to get away from them, or that their "hacked dopamine loops" have addicted them to the zuckermusk algorithms.
2/
But if you actually listen to the people who've stayed behind, you'll learn that the main reason our friends stay on legacy platforms is that they care about the other people there more than they hate Zuck or Musk.
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They rely on them because they're in a rare-disease support group with you; or they all coordinate their kids' little league carpools there; or that's where they stay in touch with family and friends they left behind when they emigrated; or they're customers or the audience for creative labor.
All those people might want to leave, too, but it's really hard to agree on where to go, when to go, and how to re-establish your groups when you get somewhere else.
4/
Caring about those they can connect with there is the reason people stick with enshittification-based social media, but that is itself one more reason to leave it. Participating does harm to the people you care about by encouraging them to keep that bad habit. Even if it doesn't persuade anyone else it's enough motivation for me.
"they didn't get to run GM >Entil< Ronald Reagan"
Great job as usual on the post.
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