The good news is that this post gives me a week of daily posting to start the year!
Many of us post to Twitter, Facebook, and other social media sites on a daily basis, usually multiple times throughout our day. They’re usually free and easy to access, plus it’s a way for us to stay in touch our friends and family. Social media sites have a number of issues, however:
- If you’re not paying for it, you become the product – An issue with any free service on the Internet for years, their terms of service (TOS) usually give them the right to use anything you enter, from your contact information to your photos to anything you post in your social media feeds, however they wish, including selling that information to people and companies you may not want association with.
- The “enshittification” of social media sites – Author Cory Doctrow coined today term in 2022. It was named the word of the year in 2023. In short, enshittification is what happens when sites like Twitter and Facebook lock their users in with high switching costs (“all my family is on Facebook!”) and then keep making changes that makes the site/service worse and worse until the site loses advertisers and, finally, users. Elon Musk bought Twitter, for example, and made sure to accelerate the enshittification of the site to the point that it’s a ghost of its former self.
- Social media is limiting – Twitter has a character count limit of 280 characters. Mastodon’s limit is usually 500 characters. Other social media sites have similar character limits, while services like Facebook are limited more by their interface, which isn’t designed for long form writing and publishing. Posting on my site gives me the ability to combine my writing along with photos, music, videos, and other media, as well as the ability to format it the way I want.
- Censorship (or lack thereof) – Many times, I’ve seen friends post screen shots of posts they’ve made which were blocked by Facebook or Twitter because they “violate community standards”, though what standards are violated are never made clear. Twitter even suspended my account twice for similar reasons. Meanwhile, fascists and bigots post with near impunity, even after reports from multiple users. I don’t have to deal with any of that on my own website.
I will continue to post on my social media accounts, but you may have already noticed that most of my posts link to my website. My main writing will take place on my site, while I’ll use my social media accounts to amplify my posts. I may drop a comment or reply here or there, but I hope to keep my “doomscrolling” on social media to a minimum.