How to Leave Dying Social Media Platforms

Online, a lot of us have been unhappy with our social media platforms for a long time, but we hang in there, year after year, scandal after scandal, because as much as we hate the platform, we love the people who use the platform. We don’t leave because we don’t want to lose them. They don’t leave because they don’t want to lose us. It’s a hostage ... See more

The irony here is that the internet is a machine for solving collective action problems. Wikis let millions of people coordinate their labor to produce all manner of materials (most notably, the greatest encyclopedia the world has ever seen), and source-control systems like git let large numbers of people collaborate to build software together (mos... See more

There are plenty of other places we could go. The Fediverse is a collection of “federated” social media services that are easy to set up and run. You can find a server whose management strikes you as reasonable and competent and move there.

there’s one problem that stands in the way of this mass exodus — one critical collective action problem the Fediverse can’t solve. Anyone in the Fediverse can easily talk to other people in the Fediverse — but they can’t talk to the people they leave behind on the big platforms like Facebook and Twitter.

If you value the relationships you formed on Facebook or Twitter, you are likely worried about the future of those relationships. Those platforms are in the hands of arrogant, insulated billionaires who have promised to transform them into something that would be unrecognizable to you, and that’s the best case scenario.

There is a way to give these toppling monoliths a soft landing, and that’s something we should want. Even if you are eager — as I am — to consign Big Tech to the scrapheap of history, the communities, friendships and family relationships they’ve taken hostage should be preserved. They aren’t the problem with Big Tech.

They had a collective action problem. Each of them could figure out what worked best for them, but getting together to decide what was best for all of them was literally impossible.

It’s easy to look at the hours and passion we’ve poured into these platforms over the years and beat ourselves up with Samuel Johnson’s maxim, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.” But the problem with social media isn’t that we gave them our labor for free —that “labor” was for the people we cared about, not for social media’s shar... See more