My Space after Facebook

Hello everyone, I'll probably do an “About Me” post at some point but for today I'm gonna assume if you're here it's because you know me IRL and you clicked through from my Facebook exit.

Why Am I Leaving Those Platforms?

The final straw that broke the camel's back was reading a Lemmy post (a reddit alternative I'll touch on later) that stated certain hashtags on Instagram were being blocked (here is an example article). I read it alongside a slew of Trump's first-day actions and it barely registered past a silent “that's fucked”.

After scrolling for a bit longer on Lemmy I did a sort of double take. They're blocking what again? So I went to Instagram and tried some terms for myself.

I sat there for a second and chewed on that. Now I don't use Instagram for political content, I don't utilize the story feature or the search function. I don't really use Instagram. This blocked content isn't disrupting how I actively use the platform. Instagram is an app I downloaded because my best friends wanted to send me reels and that was their app of choice. I used it as a micro-blog when I had good photos to share, partially because I felt guilty that my Facebook posts at that time were almost entirely political (which we can talk about at a later date) or entirely absent. I was acutely aware that not everyone who followed me did so because they wanted to hear my political thoughts. Furthermore, a good number of them were trapped in that political landscape with me, so I was preaching to the choir. So Instagram was an easy place to post casual life updates; besides, I couldn't fathom a situation where a photo I took inspired a political post. My political writing style was mostly reactionary data collection and summarization.

Naturally overtime I began to look at reels on the platform I'm being sent reels on, and now it's a part of my daily digital consumption routine. It was always apparent to me, or I always assumed, that these websites pushed certain content over others. A single second on a Ben Shapiro clip was algorithmically weighted far heavier than a single second of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) content. The news about Twitter's heavy handedness after Elon Musk bought it reinforced these beliefs and quite frankly it makes sense – a profit driven company aims to perform the most profitable actions it can. There's far more money to be made in fleecing sheep than there is in educating them. But now what was speculatively happening in the background, something I could partially resist with careful curation, was overt. It was unpreventable. I was being forced to not look at specific content; therefore giving further weight to the remaining approved content.

Instagram has since reverted this behavior, but that doesn't undo the damage. Again, it's not that I can now search for things they temporarily blocked – that isn't how or why I use Instagram. What's important is that they have a list of things to block and for a moment that list was made visible. The censorship didn't disappear it just reverted back to being covert, to being behind the scenes forcing me to speculate about what's happening. Which is fine for me and my actions, but infinitely harder for me to prove to others – from spreading the word and dismantling this system of propaganda.

So I'm leaving because, in part, these platforms are influencing us and the subject matter, the vector of influence, is clearly not objective or uncaring. It is profit seeking, it is politically driven, and it will corrupt you overtime. We all know someone divorced from reality – in my experience they have the same media diet as everyone else divorced from reality, and they didn't all start there. A lot of them started by listening to a radio program, started with a video of someone who seemed reasonable and academic, started with a streamer who seemed relatable and angry. So I'm leaving in the hopes that I'm reducing that vector of attack, that in 30 years from now I won't be divorced from reality. The last thing I want is to be a burden on progress.

Where Am I Going To?

Well first of all, obviously, here. I've always wanted my own place on the internet, I've flirted with my own blog for years, I've programmed a couple of possible versions and always I let them wilt on the vine for other artistic priorities. So I paid some money and now we're here. This is a platform I pay to use and you don't have to pay to read, and I like that. I'll probably write a post about what I plan to put here but we'll save that for another date, but it's safe to say if I'm going to post online 75% of it will be right here.

The other 25% is going to be on a slew of other apps which are all connected. If you haven't heard about the fediverse (the federated universe) let me give you a crash course. Facebook is an application that is owned by one company and it contains both the front end and the back end of a service. What I mean is they own both the data that makes up my account and how my account is presented and interacted with. This can be referred to as a walled garden, it is not an open source solution. The fediverse is a group of apps that agreed to use the same back end (the data that makes up my account) and then customize how they present the front end. In this way I can be on fediverse Twitter and experience the world through micro-blogs and then jump over to fediverse Instagram and experience the world through images. They can both pull from the same account, I can get my tweets in my Instagram feed and my pictures in my twitter feed, and if either of them decide to – oh I don't know – start supporting fascists, I can bail for another app within the fediverse and not leave my communities or my work behind because all the apps talk to each other. Unlike traditional apps, no one owns my data and I'm not locked into a platform. Side tangent, here is a great blog that talks about why people struggle to leave some social platforms and how we can best help them. I've just discovered this fella and everything I've read so far has given me aspirational goals as a blogger.

The fediverse is an open source community that offers decentralized means of being on social media! Here's a video that does a better job of explaining it.

So, I'm replacing a bunch of my monopolized walled garden apps with these open source fediverse apps:

Here's a list of some other apps I'm not planning on using at this time, but could move to if there was demand from you all.

Some other things I'm doing JUST BY THE WAY:

How to Contact Me

If you swap over to any of these programs I am @gusgalarnyk in all of them.

You can email me at: [email protected]

And if you email me, I'll give you my phone number if you don't already have it.

Thanks for reading what I write, I appreciate it. Please provide feedback if you've got it. Hopefully this is the start of something new and something familiar! Don’t be a stranger.

If you'd like you can provide feedback or support me here!