Over the past eighteen months or so, I’ve been rethinking and re-tooling my approach to social media and life online. My motivation is largely to wrest control over my digital life away from large corporations (particularly when those corporations may have owners/founders/boards whose interests are anathema to my own). I’ve reached the conclusion that I can no longer accept the Faustian bargain we’ve struck with Zuckerburg, Dorsey and their ilk (more on that below, if you care).
I no longer want to create artistic or intellectual content for free in an environment where a rich man can choose, on a whim, to upend the whole system and scatter all the connections with real people I’ve spent years developing, or where my posts aren’t shared with the people who specifically asked to see them just because Mark Zuckerberg thinks it’s too “political.” I don’t want to further enrich people who already have millennia of wealth, and I certainly don’t want to do it for free (or at the expense of my time or privacy).
I’ve been a big fan of writer and activist Cory Doctorow for a number of years. He advocates the “POSSE” approach to posting in the era of social media and the social web. The idea is that we should all maintain ownership and control over the works of our own minds (I’ll also note that Cory Doctorow was one of the people behind the creation of the Creative Commons: if you’re an artist of any kind, you should have some understanding of that). We shouldn’t turn away from the major platforms, especially if friends and family, or potential readers/audience members are active, but we should always make sure that our work is accessible as long as we want it to be, regardless of the latest whims of Mark Zuckerberg or Sundar Pinchai or Elon Musk. In many ways, this is to the social web what email was a generation before. Regardless of whether you had AOL or Prodigy or Gmail or Hotmail, you could send mail to anyone else, and vice versa.
To that end, I’m trying to make sure that I don’t post anything on Facebook or Instagram that I haven’t shared elsewhere. I want to make sure that having an account on a major platform isn’t required to see what I post or to contact me.
(See update below) My primary “microblog1” at the moment is my mastodon account: @SamUpstate@bluelupine.social. (I’m also the administrator of that instance, so if you’re curious and want to join, or you just want to learn more, please reach out to me–I’ve found it to be a fairly positive place, and I’d love to share that with others.) I also have accounts on Bluesky (@sam.upstate.blog) and on Threads (@SamUpstate.threads.net). Threads is technically also owned by Meta, just like Facebook, and it’s tightly coupled with Instagram. I’m okay maintaining an account there because there are a number of people there with whom I don’t have connections in other ways. Meta has also indicated a desire to allow Threads to “federate” with other systems using the same underlying protocol. So just like you can send an email from your gmail account to someone else’s hotmail account, in the future, you should be able to view mastodon content from a Threads account, and vice versa.
I’m also somewhat active on Instagram. Like content I post to Threads and Facebook, I try to make sure I’ve posted it elsewhere as well, usually on Mastodon or here.
And finally, for more personal stuff, I use a number of Signal groups, and I occasionally share content to my Signal “Story.” I’d probably share a good deal more there if other people were interested. If even two or three friends or relatives from Facebook connected with me on Signal, I’d make a real effort to make sure to share more personal stuff (e.g., pictures of my kids) there.
Update (January 2, 2025)
I’ve since shut down my Threads account, and I’ve moved towards closing my mastodon instance. To that end, my mastodon account is now https://hachyderm.io/@SamUpstate. If you were already following me, you should have been added as a follower to my new account as part of the migration process.
- In my mind, a “microblog” is any system or platform that encourages people to share small bursts of thought, typically just words, but often pictures or video. Twitter was very much a “microblog.” ↩︎