{"id":1404,"date":"2025-01-22T11:47:10","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T11:47:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/?p=1404"},"modified":"2025-01-22T11:48:29","modified_gmt":"2025-01-22T11:48:29","slug":"social-media-is-over","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/social-media-is-over\/","title":{"rendered":"Social media is over"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1407 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/01\/mastodon-300x239.png\" alt=\"Mastodon\" width=\"300\" height=\"239\" \/>I&#8217;m too old school to have ever fully embraced social media &#8211; my entry into online connection came long enough before it that I&#8217;ve always regarded it with a bit of suspicion. The return just isn&#8217;t great enough for the time and energy investment, although I do understand those who have found it a valuable way to interact online and I have used it in a limited capacity for a long time. So the idea of exiting it, or at least leaving the toxic proprietary world of those north American capitalist billionaires, is complicated. But I&#8217;m going to do it. I just can&#8217;t justify continuing to support them.<\/p>\n<p>I closed my Twitter account after the platform was perverted into X, and I&#8217;ve never had a personal Facebook account, but my furry companion Zecica has been there since 2009. We&#8217;ve had some discussions lately around not only the recent announcement of the suspension of fact-checking, but all of the other negative aspects of social media in general and Facebook\/Meta in particular &#8211; the sucking of time, the exploitation of content and attention, the reduction of the world into \u201clikes\u201d and \u201cfriends\u201d, the bitchiness of it all. We&#8217;re told it connects us. We&#8217;re told we can reach audiences. We&#8217;re told we need a social media presence in order to be a serious artist or a valid person. We discover high school acquaintances who we haven&#8217;t thought about for decades and we get endorphin kicks when someone posts a kitten video or hearts our post about having the flu. And we consume huge amounts of energy and generate tonnes of e-waste and pump profits into the pockets of the billionaires.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s known as &#8220;social&#8221; media but it&#8217;s actually political. To stay there is a political statement, as it is to leave. And there are alternatives! We don&#8217;t need to keep feeding that machine, we can chose to put our time and energy into other more democratic, less capitalistic platforms. Here&#8217;s where you can find me now:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Mastodon:\u00a0@helen<span class=\"invisible\">@systerserver.town &#8211; it&#8217;s decentralised, and the server that my account is on is the Syster Server, a feminist server operated by a collective that developed from the Eclectic Tech Carnival and Gender Changers networks. This site is a good resource for learning about Mastodon, the Fediverse, and how to join:\u00a0https:\/\/fedi.tips\/<\/span><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/bsky.app\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bluesky<\/a>:\u00a0helenvarley.bsky.social &#8211; I don&#8217;t know how active I&#8217;ll be here, it&#8217;s mainly like the old Twitter and I was never very active on that. But I&#8217;m giving it a go!<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/mewe.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">MeWe<\/a>:\u00a0helenvarley.78 &#8211; I have no idea if this will come to anything, at the moment it&#8217;s very quiet, but it&#8217;s more Facebook-like than Bluesky.<\/li>\n<li>Email: still my favourite way of connecting!<\/li>\n<li>Signal: ditch Meta&#8217;s Messenger and Whatsapp!<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Looking forward to seeing you on some of these platforms!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are alternatives to the toxic world of capitalist proprietary social media!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1407,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","category-politics","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1404"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1404\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1409,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1404\/revisions\/1409"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.creative-catalyst.com\/expect\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}