We Don’t Need Corporate Social Media
Elon Musk is just about the last person on earth (or Mars) you’d want in charge of communities, online or otherwise. He shares transphobic and anti-Semitic memes, promotes covid misinformation, has run afoul of the National Labor Relations Board for an anti-union tweet; the SEC even charged him with securities fraud over his tweets. Still it happened. Twitter accepted Musk’s out of the blue $44 billion buyout offer on Monday. Now the social media platform founded in 2006—and its two hundred million users—are set to be subject to the chaotic whims of the Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder.
The situation might seem hopeless — if not this billionaire, then another — but remember, internet users communicate every day with the World Wide Web and email, which are noncommercial and decentralized. These resources have no Musk, no Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg-figures at the top. In this moment of transition, we can learn from such examples in internet history and consider what might be the best tools to organize online communities going forward.
Twitter could soon become internet history itself. Those who have been online for a while will remember the declines of social media companies like MySpace (once the most popular website in the world), Livejournal, Snapchat, and Tumblr. It can happen gradually: several hours on a platform a day turns to several hours a week, and then finally, you just sort of forget about it. There is never a shortage of things to look at on the internet.
Recognizing the awfulness of Twitter has been part and parcel of the Twitter experience: we “doomscroll” on the “hellsite.” Perhaps this scrappy spirit and self-deprecating humor makes the platform feel more resilient than it actually is, but the speed of the deal with Musk suggests otherwise. Twitter is not exactly a robust company and it won’t be even if the deal should fall through.
Even if you intend to stick around for now, you can never count on a community hosted by a corporation. In a desperate attempt to generate a profit, Twitter could alienate regular users with community-breaking features that overwhelm the site whether ranging from aggressive targeted ads or the reversion of years of progressive measures to curb harassment. In any case, it doesn’t hurt to start thinking about alternatives.
Instead of migrating to another corporate platform, we should think about building interoperable and noncommercial online communities similar to the resilient resources that have worked for decades. Newsletters are a great example. When Tinyletter began to grow popular around 2014, it seemed (at least to me) like nostalgia for simpler times online. But newsletters as a format give users a great deal of control and their popularity has continued to grow. You can delete stalkers and harassers from your list of recipients. Plus, you can export your email list — the newsletter equivalent of a “following” — to another service relatively easily. The decentralized nature of email makes it possible for users to leave Substack in favor of alternate newsletter services to protest the company’s decision to host transphobic commentators and other objectionable policies. Leaving Musk behind isn’t that easy, unfortunately.
Likewise, the blogosphere was not a platform. It was a number of independent websites linking to one another (and the rest of the web). There aren’t as many blogs these days to speak of a “blogosphere” but some of the ones that are still around are pretty great (Jason Kottke just celebrated the twenty-fourth year of his blog). If you set up a blog on a website, you decide what to post there, you decide whether comments will appear under a post on not.
When Twitter first launched, it was regularly referred to as a “microblogging” service. People posted information they might have otherwise blogged like interesting links and personal reflections to fit the platform’s 140-character constraint. The company developed social features like replies, retweets, direct messages, and hashtag filters cultivating engagement. Gradually internet users spent less time on blogs and more time on corporate social media (it’s a little more complicated than that’s but here’s where you can read a fuller story).
Despite these social features, the look of a Twitter timeline still resembles an RSS feed. Twitter feeds, Mastodon feeds, and other online publications and presences can be viewed with an RSS reader, just as blogs were when blogging was the rage. RSS readers were pretty good. What would happen if a new user-friendly RSS reader debuted? Maybe it wouldn’t result in an internet repopulated with blogs, but it could harness the enduring potential of the World Wide Web. It happened with newsletters…why not RSS?
I write this, although I’m doubtful about it, because I think it’s important to keep this conversation alive: THE INTERNET CAN BE BETTER. Maybe not great. But better. Yes, it definitely can be better.
Conversations about building a better online experiences are often shut down with accusations of “nostalgia” for an imperfect internet past. The internet in the 90s was by no means a perfect place. But to set a goal to build noncommercial and decentralized social media is no more nostalgic than recognizing life would be a lot easier for most if housing were more plentiful and the average rent in Manhattan were a 90s throwback: $800/month (that is, if there has to be rent at all). At the end of the day, Twitter dot com is just another website, by some measure, no different than an HTML page any user can upload to the web on their own.
Whatever should come of Twitter’s deal with Elon Musk, the news is an occasion for all Twitter users to reassess their engagement with the platform. We can’t revive what the blogosphere was in the aughts but we can look at it as model of what communities online still have the potential to be.
We don’t need corporate social media. What we need are options that empower users: community-scale tools rather than mass $44 billion dollar hellsites. Nothing is inevitable, but thirty years of the World Wide Web has shown us that we are never going to run out of places online for people to share jokes and links to interesting stuff.
