Carole Cadwalladr’s recent Ted Talk, “This is a Digital Coup” is worth a listen. If you’re unfamiliar with Cadwalladr’s work, she’s one of the main reporters who broke the Cambridge Analytica-Facebook story (and was shortlisted for the Pulitzer for it) almost a decade ago. She was sued for her last Ted Talk, and is visibly nervous during this one, though the courts vindicated her.
Social Media
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The other day I got an email from Tyler Ibrahim, one of the creators of Pools, a new app for "personal and intentional sharing – social but not social media." It's available for iPhone and Android.
I gave it a look and it appears to be an interesting take on many of the functions social media offers but absent many of the functions that make social media awful. For instance, there's no followers or following. There's likes and hearts, but only the person who posted the thing you're liking or hearting can see your reactions, thus eliminating the performance aspect of social media. If you comment on something, you can make it so only certain people can see the comment, or only the person who created the post, and your comment cannot be viewed by people you're not already connected to.
Since there's no following/followers, there's also no way to search for users. That means no one can find you on Pools. The only people you're connected to are those you send an invite to — or those who you accept an invite link from.
There's also no algorithm. You see things when you choose to in the order they're posted.
The app is new so things may change, but they seem dedicated to the anti-social media stance they're launching with.
I'm not an app developer, but I had a similar idea years ago when I launched Volver. I was looking for an app that would allow one-to-group posting and I was mostly thinking of businesses who want to reveal things to their customers and have a way for customers to respond, but not a way for customers to connect to one another. I don't believe Pools has this function, but perhaps it's something they'll consider in the future.
Once again, Joan Westenberg hits it out of the park with Why Personal Websites Matter More Than Ever:
I don’t know why we talk about walled gardens. That seems to imply something beautiful, something worth defending. It conjures images of beautifully maintained flowerbeds protected from the outside world. But that’s not what Facebook built, what Instagram built, what Twitter built. They built paved, unshaded, barren hellscapes, trapped us in them, and surrounded us with guard towers and razor wire, intended to keep us in, not protect us from anyone else. There's no "garden" here.
You can read the whole thing on Westenberg, which, like A Tiny Bell, is powered by Ghost.
My dislike of Facebook and Instagram is probably obviously. I haven’t been on either service in years, but someone on Metafilter shared this one-page site created by Jon Oliver’s team and I thought it was worth sharing: How to Make Yourself Less Valuable to Meta, which tells you the steps you should take to best protect your data when using those services.
Following up on my post about Social Media, I give you: Critical Ignoring as a Core Competence for Digital Citizens, which I found over on Kottke. The difference is that I decided to do it offline as well.
This week, a Bell Ringer named Jennifer asked if I could start putting easy-links at the bottom of posts so she could share them on social media. Also, a friend asked if I'd link to her Instagram. It wasn't the first time I've been asked either question so I thought I'd address them in a post and clarify my self-inflicted social media policy.
Each post ends with a way to copy the permalink so you can post wherever you like, but I did remove the Twitter/X and Facebook repost icons from my site before it launched. I also stated in the About section that I'd never link to content on social media. Why? Because I care a great deal about branding and I do not want to associate myself with those brands. I go out of my way in real life to not mindlessly promote things — for instance, I don't wear branded clothing because I feel that they're implied endorsements — and leaving those icons on my site in order to generate views would go against that decision.
This week, Meta decided to make the world a worse place by removing fact-checkers from Facebook and Instagram, and Elon Musk did this:
These are not behaviours I can abide. The truth is that I do not understand how anyone still uses these companies' services with good conscience. The continued use of Meta or Musk products promotes the brands — tacitly, perhaps, but also: undeniably.
During the pandemic, I made a point of cutting myself off from people I felt were going through life making the world a worse place by not behaving consciously. Friends and customers who were "casually" racist, homophobic, sexist, or transphobic were blocked on my phone and ignored completely in real life. Without explanation, I ended several relationships with people I've known for many years, some of them three or four decades. I was done with them. I am done with it.
One of my favorite working artists is Shane Drinkwater, but I've never linked to his work because it's only viewable on Instagram. Rick Holland, a favorite poet, now operates out of Substack, so — no — same goes for one of my favorite podcasters, Lea Thau, and for Mehdi Hasan, one of the best broadcasters working today. I will not support them because doing so funds their platforms. It puts money in the pockets of people and corporations actively, consciously, and intentionally ruining the good of the world.
2025 and beyond are going to be difficult for good people and glorious for the ignorant, oblivious, or mean-spirited. I do not need bad actors in my life and I will do my best not to put anything out into the world that makes people think that being a bad actor is okay. It may be misguided or arrogant to think that having an easy-to-click X logo on my tiny spot on the web is contributing to the downfall of society, but I honestly do believe that to be the case. You may think this self-righteous, but we must all remember that it truly does take a village. I refuse to be party to being grist for a mill that will crush us all.
Ev Williams (one of the creators of Blogger, Twitter, and Medium) on his new app, Mozi:
Clearly, it would need to be private. Non-performative. No public profiles. No public status competitions. No follower counts. No strangers.
Mozi claims to be a private social network that connects you to people you already know via your contacts list. This may seem a little counterintuitive, but here's a true example from my own life:
I lived in a small town called Oliva, Spain, from September through November, 2017. In the summer of 2018, when I was living in Culver City, CA, I saw a photo on social media of a friend I'd drifted apart from and hadn't seen in 20 years. That photo was taken in Gandia, Spain, in October, 2017. Gandia is the neighboring town to Oliva and my friend was staying just 2KM away from where I was living. In fact, in those months, while I was hiking through Orange Groves, we were closer to one another than we are when we're both home in Toronto.
Had Mozi existed back then — and we'd both been using it — we would have been alerted to each other's presence and been able to make plans to meet.
I'm not normally someone to evangelize for social media, but I do find the purpose of Mozi to be useful and am therefore giving it a shot. At the moment it's only available for iPhone (there's an Android waitlist) and it's pretty much pointless unless your contacts are on it, but I'm willing to give it a shot and see what happens.
In Today's Reason to avoid Social Media: Report Finds Social Media Companies Engaged in Vast Surveillance.
"The report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year..."
FTC Staff Report Finds Large Social Media and Video Streaming Companies Have Engaged in Vast Surveillance of Users with Lax Privacy Controls and Inadequate Safeguards for Kids and Teens
A new Federal Trade Commission staff report that examines the data collection and use practices of major social media and video streaming services shows they engaged in vast surveillance of consume
