If you are still using X/twitter, the writing is on the wall: you can no longer ignore what trans people and women of colour have been saying for years — you are officially hanging out in the Nazi bar.
The problem with Google is less obvious because the platform is managed by the adults in the room, but it fired internal protestors against Project Nimbus, a contract to supply artificial intelligence (AI) to the Israeli Defence Force (IDF).
The problem with Meta is that their products are trash, but they recently published new moderation guidelines that explicitly permit users to slur trans people as mentally ill ‘because of current debates over transgenderism,’ and its CEO is sucking up to MAGA and the manosphere.
Both Microsoft and Google are forcibly jamming LLM based functionality in the user’s face whenever you try to use or pay for their products.
I know I am not the only one thinking of changing all my platforms at once.
Departing all platforms
There has been a lot of angst about trying to pick a winner in the competition to replace X/twitter, with people moving to Mastodon (at first) and then Threads and more recently BlueSky.
Personally I don’t understand the angst: by all means, try all of them. Be a social media maximalist and post on all three just to see how it feels.
I lasted about a week on Threads before I got sick of the feed algorithm only showing me the same six topics: queer, trans, ADHD, autism, disability and mental illness. I found it confronting that the algorithm was constantly reminding me ‘you’re different, special, unusual.’ And broken!
At the time I tried it, Threads was doing a really poor job of a key task for enjoyable social media: surfacing serendipity, the hidden topics of interest available within a dynamic corpus of posts.
I tried BlueSky next, and despite users’ rhetoric about how nice they all are, I was very quickly reminded that twitter was a dumpster fire long before Elon purchased it, with a toxic culture of microcelebrity where users with as little as 10K followers behaved as though they were exempt from social norms.
Most of BlueSky’s users are ex-twitter, most of them stayed there long after the trans people left and the Nazis arrived, and most are hoping it will be a simple, easy one-to-one switcharoo. So the norms are heavily influenced by X/twitter.
I had to laugh when a self-published author with 3.5K followers tried to bully me for expressing my taste in television in a particularly autistic way (I said: I don’t like shows with heavy foreshadowing).
My goodness. I had a very public fight with Salman Rushdie on twitter over his obsequious chivalry towards Caster Semenya, where I argued she probably wanted less ‘m’lady’ and more respect for her performance as an elite athlete. At the time he had 100K followers who did not take kindly to seeing the Great Man questioned. So my flame retardant suiting is thick — but I still really dislike the way normies on BlueSky have declared open season on auties in the name of niceness. It’s a bit on the nose.
I keep coming back to Mastodon, which my friend Zoe perfectly describes as ‘carob’ — it really doesn’t give you what your heart desires from social media, the Dairy Milk chocolate, the interesting posts and interaction with strangers, but it perhaps gives you what you actually need — a small cohort of people who like you, and in whose trials and tribulations you become invested over time.
‘Masto’ feels a lot like Facebook did when I could see everything my friends posted, before the Newsfeed algorithm changed to prioritise suggested content.
But it, too, has its downsides. Hoo boy, the lecturing of newbies, and the FOSSlords popping up in your mentions to recommend you solve your Office 365 problem by installing a Linux and running LibreOffice — not fun. And navigating threads of posts across multiple instances remains confusing as hell.
The goal for a beginner is to pick a smallish friendly instance and park yourself there for a few months, up to a year, while you learn the ropes and potentially identify an instance that suits you better. I started out on the technolibertarian haven Eigenmagic before migrating to Sciences.Social and finally I decided to give the poor economists a break from my queer, mentally ill ravings and I moved to (the incredibly named) Beige.party.
People will tell you it’s either all-important or not important at all to choose a platform with an open architecture underlying it — the messaging protocol that enables other people and companies to develop their own clients and instances. This is yet another instance of techies thinking there are technical solutions to problems that are fundamentally social in nature.
I personally think the more important question is who controls the platform — if you’re on Threads or Facebook or Instagram or WhatsApp, you are still operating under the aegis of Zuckerberg and those moderation guidelines that permit hate speech against trans folks.
Politics in transit
I keep coming back to the treatment of trans people on major platforms — why? Leftier-than-thou mates insist that trans liberation is a side show, a distraction from the real manly business of building working class consciousness and the labour movement.
But, like it or not, the fight has been picked with us, and now we have to win it, otherwise terrible things will ensue for our trans comrades. A labour movement that throws marginalised folks under the bus isn’t worth shit; as Sam Wallman reminds us, real hard unionist men levied Pink Bans in the 1970s.
If you’re wondering why I’m centring masculinity in this analysis, I don’t think it’s by accident these lefty ‘mates’ are all cis white men. If they had the identity forming and organising skills of people of colour, sissies and queers, the labour movement would be in much better shape than it is.
Next station
In my next post I’ll dive into the nitty-gritty with recommendations for alternatives to the major platforms for chat, e-mail, and social media.