Heavy sigh.
I’ve made no secret of my dislike of corporate, algorithmic social media. I’ve always been aware of its problems, but particularly after wrapping my head around Mastodon and seeing what an organic, non-exploitive platform is like, I’m finding it increasingly hard to stomach.
For a long time, Facebook has been so unbelievably broken for me that I could largely ignore it. Finding anything of value or interest was so muddled by the endless churn of algorithmic content, I could walk away from it without a second thought. The Operation: Puppet Facebook page has largely been vestigial, but I felt I should maintain a presence on the platform as most of the rest of the puppet building world seems to have chosen it as their default space. The “Meta business suite” that I must use to run the page is such a poorly organized mess that I often miss messages and only use it when I have to. If you want to contact me, Facebook is not a reliable way to do it.
And then the news broke that Zuck is letting the Orange Idiot back.
Part of being a business owner in today’s world is about making sure people can find you, and that, at least for the present, means getting into bed with the gross predatory platforms that control where the eyeballs go. There is no option not to. Without the Etsy search engine, my shop would wither and die, and along with it everything O:P does. It’s just a fact. It’s an awful fact and it’s a deeply immoral fact, but facts are facts.
So for me it comes down to how far am I willing to go? How much benefit is O:P getting versus the self-respect I’m sacrificing? I straight up deleted my Twitter account when Musk took over, and I even liked that platform (if not practice). I had a decent number of followers, and it was good for viewer counts, but Elon was a Musk Too Far. I bailed. And now with you-know-who being unsuspended I’m faced with a similar choice. This is my line in the sand.
The complication is Instagram, as it’s owned by Meta, and deeply linked into Facebook. I get a non-trivial amount of traffic from Instagram that does directly lead to new folks coming into the O:P sphere. I could leave Facebook and not feel it much but leaving Instagram would hurt O:P.
I’m still debating what to do about the whole situation, talking it over with my (much wiser) partner and the good folks on the Discord (join the Discord). There will be a change in the near future, but I have to weigh up the options. This will require a little thought.
And coffee.