The hypothesis/provocation: The history of online platforms has been a history of users being handed infrastructures far beyond their financial reach or even that of the operators. These companies in turn were happy to provide the illusion of infinite free resources at a financial loss in the hopes of cashing out on the user base. When usability and the user experience are predictably destroyed by those plans going into effect, the users repeatedly go :pika_surprise: and rush to the next thing, where the same cycle repeats.
None of this is to say users are in the wrong, or that the loss of their connections and communities are their own faults. Often they *had* no other choices for connection and reach. Obviously the VC investment mechanism created this situation by preying on user needs, and big social media operators made the situation worse by drying out the digital commons.
What I will say is that we can't keep doing the same thing and expect different results. When BlueSky does it, when InstaThreads does it, when Tumblr does it, when LiveJournal did it, Facebook did it, Twitter is doing it etc. etc. Of course they did and of course they will. It's been going on for decades. Why would anyone be surprised?
The social media VC model was always unsustainable and always predictable. Social media that works in the long term was always going to be difficult, expensive, janky, and messy. It was always going to take work and community.
That's where we are now with the fedi, and that's why comparisons of how it measures up to Twitter or whatever all fall wide of the mark. Try to be like Twitter and it will go the way of Twitter. Again, these patterns are not new or surprising, and while I can understand why some might want to deny reality, for my own well-being I can't indulge these illusions.
People are free to repeat that cycle over and over again if they want to, of course. And hey, as long as they recognize the built-in impermanence of quote-unquote free platforms and use these tools as the deliberately breakable toys they are, more power to them!
What I can't deal with anymore is the denial of reality, the toxic illusion that tech corpos have our best interests at heart, or that these eleventy billion incidents that all follow the same pattern are the product of individual bad actors and not a fundamentally broken system.
So I'm not saying don't use corporate media ever, or that if you do so you're tainted or a collaborator or whatever techbro puritan talk I could care less about. I'm saying: Have a plan. Don't invest your entire connections and attachments into one corporate media platform, and for God's sake don't trust it to be there for you long-term.
Build a personal website. Get your people's contact info outside social media. Back up your data. Build community and support a fedi instance, if that's your pace. Heck, maybe build a fedi instance. Whatever you do, be ready to be able to function without the tech companies' "generosity." Because they sure as hell don't care about you.
I wonder if people recognize the Buddhist influences throughout this thread lol. Because it's not about avoiding sin which is a very Western Christian thing, *laughs in white atheist leftists and techbros obsessed with wrongdoing and purity* but rather about being conscious of reality as it is and not suffering unnecessarily from unrealistic and contradictory desires.
Like do you use corporate social media that's operating at a loss to grow its userbase and farm data? Cool, do what you like, but if you don't want to get burned be aware it's going to get cashed out at some point and not to your benefit. I can't and don't want to control what you do, all I can do is warn you of the consequences and hope you prepare for them.