the (social) media is broken
Social media has broken itself (again).
The last few years have seen people "fleeing" social media platforms in droves – first it was from X to Threads, then from TikTok to RedNote. It'll probably happen again now for Threads, Instagram, and Facebook — anything related to Meta.
With horrible policies, unsolicited AI tools, and crappy updates1 flooding every social media platform, I'm seeing a great deal of chatter about "going back" to places like tumblr.
Alas, even tumblr has been tAInted. I recently went back on there and was besieged by ads with n00d AI ladies on them – I mean, they might have been hot, if the anatomy of their extremities even vaguely made sense. :')
And so we have a very large demographic of internet users who feel bereft of dependable social connection tools. A bunch are leaving for Discord and Twitch. Those with longer online memories – both in the sense that I can sing the dial-up tone and that I can trace myself on the internet back to the noughties — are reverting to the tiny internet and other old reliables, where the only things that change are our own preferences. (Last I heard, some people were holding a summoning circle for MySpace.)
I imagine platforms like Bear and LiveJournal might see an influx of people trying to find connection when everything is a lil bit broken everywhere else. They're a little bit like third spaces on the internet – places where people go to hang out for free. And where nobody's up on a soapbox in the middle of the room live-narrating your every move.
The straws with which Instagram may have broken the Meta-phorical camel's back: Firstly, changing their grid display from squares to 4:3 rectangles without notice (and thereby destroying years' worth of careful curation for thousands of creators); and secondly, reintroducing a much-reviled feature from their early days: giving you the ability to see Reels that your friends have liked. Way to make sure nobody likes anything ever again. (There are people on Insta who have no business discovering my queerness through my Reels activity, thank you very much.) Speculation on Threads suggests that these changes are being made because Instagram sees itself as a TikTok replacement. Which is awkies, because even the people on Meta don't like Meta.↩