Just kidding! I never got into TikTok. I left Twitter when Elon Musk bought it. Purl’s still begrudgingly keeps a presence on Facebook and Instagram, but as more people discover the blog feed here, we hope to abandon them. We’re using Discord a lot right now because it gives us privacy and control but I’m afraid it will go toxic too at some point. I spend more time on Reddit than I probably should, but at least you can filter what you’re looking for.
I’ve been listening to the podcast “You’re Wrong About” obsessively, and this episode about smartphones and social media and this one about email got me thinking about the internet and how we can make it better. One way is to get away from platforms we don’t own. I pay for my domain names, and I pay for my web/email hosting (from local provider purplecat.net! They are great!). It’s not very expensive and I know they aren’t scraping my data to sell to advertisers. It IS annoying to have to spell out my email domain instead of saying gmail, but it’s a point of pride now. If you can’t afford your own, neocities and proton mail are not evil yet, just remember that you are relying on them to not become evil.
I miss having a lot of sites to go visit. I’ve been on Metafilter.com for 20+ years, which has finally transitioned to a community-run site. I used to read a lot of webcomics daily but my favorite creators moved on to other things or got stuck retreading the same territory too long. There’s less text than there used to be and more audio and video. Why aren’t there as many dumb flash games (I know, flash is dead)? What is today’s equivalent of Homestar Runner? Or is that golden age gone for good?
Finding communities online is really what we want, whether that’s on a blog, webring, Discord server, Minecraft, Overwatch, or whatever. But it’s best when we can find them in places that aren’t exploiting them. And it’s amazing when we can find communities in the real world, too. Because having lunch with your internet friends isn’t as tasty.