The Digital Social Downfall

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I see, sometimes, people talking about how they don’t really use any specific social media app as reinforcement of anything they do, or share, in regard to work, or art, and that if they did … if that was their main mode of deriving support, money, and so on, and so forth: They’d be screwed. And, well, yeah. That’s exactly correct. For all intents and purposes, if you’re just online to chat, and make friends with random people, that’s cool. You can do that in any space you choose, and you should. That’s the way the internet used to be.

For people like me, I use the internet for this reason as well, even though I’m … terrible at making friends in my near 40s, as a closeted trans woman, who spends most of my life, nowadays, hiding everything about myself in public spaces, and just … surviving.

The other half of me is online, still online, attempting to share the things I do: The music, the writing, the art, the things I make in Second Life (even though I haven’t been paying much creative attention to that as of late), and it’s rough.

You’ve got places like Reddit that have this toxic mindset built-in, where the only people allowed to share their work, are people who have already made it big. Otherwise, you’re breaking the rules.

You’ve got Bluesky, where gaining traction with anything is like playing the lottery, and, like post-2020 social media everywhere, if you don’t employ manipulative engagement tactics, you’re gonna have a bad time.

You’ve got Threads, which is exactly the same, except they’ve got bigotry coded into their Terms of Service.

And then you have Mastodon/ActivityPub (and other associated apps), where talking and chatting is highly encouraged, but building takes time. A lot of time. And some people don’t even take kindly to those who are trying to build some kind of audience on the platform/s. Which, is a shame. ActivityPub is probably one of the greatest things to happen to the internet. That it’s been partially colonized by the privileged who don’t or haven’t scraped by, or needed a helping hand, or even just support for their work, is a little bit of a minor tragedy.

But, it hasn’t suddenly become more hostile to creatives, online, though. It’s always been that way. It’s just worse, now. Especially with the rise of algorithmic theft from the un-creative, who seek to profit off of artificially generated slop, derived from people who do work.

Long ago, though, there was Twitter. The real Twitter. And, sure, the place was always toxic. This idealistic pretend idea that people have in their heads, that Twitter used to be some kind of amazing social utopia … are living in a fantasy world.

But!

Twitter was instrumental in my album Ride Eternal becoming a bestseller (before the calamity of twitter-synthwave dudes having a meltdown over transness in “their” “scene”), and, apart from Mastodon (I have had a lot of random support via ActivityPub, sporadically, throughout the years), I made a lot of progress for my work on the platform. The loss of Twitter wasn’t just a loss of some central “community square” online, it was a loss in an audience of thousands of people I, and others, had connections to.

It’s all gone.

And, now, what are we left with? To sift and jump back and forth between different spaces, hoping that something sticks hard enough that you can stop jumping back … and forth.

For many, this hasn’t happened.

For me, that is why my website is now my own personal social platform. My most important thoughts, my writing, my announcements, my little shitposts, or random things I want to say: They come here, first, and then they go to the other places.

To me, this is the only answer to the loss of some central idea of a community square where you really could reach thousands of people who might be interested in what you do.

I will never put my work, my thoughts, and my words, solely into the hands of corporate overlords, ever again.

My website cannot be taken from me, it can’t be lost forever, it can’t be deleted by some CEO who didn’t like what I had to say, it can’t be mobbed and silenced by evil little shitheads with ulterior motives and fears over the marginalized occupying spaces in their industries.

As long as I have a PC, thumb drives, portable hard drives, a laptop, a phone, my website sticks around, no matter what happens to the server it’s hosted on.

And that’s awesome.

Even if the government becomes fully 1984, and blocks out all sorts of content at the ISP level, I’ll just take my website to TOR.

That’s why you should own your content.

You should post on these platforms, and try and see what sticks. But your most important posts, well, they should be on a website. Your website. In 2025, this is the only answer to the destruction of the digital social landscape, and you owe it to yourself to at least spin something up on a template builder, if anything (although I do encourage learning at least the basics of HTML).

It’s rough out there on the world wide web, and it’s never been harder for creatives to find their people, and their audience. But, it can be done. The first step, is to own your content.

Now, of course, some select few people might see this sort of idea as “nerd shit.” And they’re free to think that way. I remember back in middle and high school, when “nerd” was a legitimate insult that inspired all kinds of bullying. And, I’m thankful, that the internet is not high school, and that people who are mentally stuck there, probably won’t be a real big part of the future digital social landscape.