Making a blog in 2025

I go in circles about Instagram - should I stay or should I go?

I think about past online platforms I’ve used and stopped using. The last time I use them is never an intentional, finite goodbye. It’s usually a slow fade out, due to lack of interest. It’s not like I remember the final time I logged into MySpace, for example (in online community hindsight, god bless MySpace).

This time, the reason I want to leave an online community is much more sinister - data mining, ai gleaning my artwork for free and at meta’s fancy, meta owning images of the people’s faces I love, poisonous, racist and fascist moderation techniques, privacy invasion - I could go on. This shit isn’t Bebo in 2003 anymore. It’s serious, nasty and dangerous.

So, I need to make a plan out of there. We all know meta makes these apps to be insidiously addictive, so it will be difficult to leave. Is a blog the remedy for that? I’m totally unsure. I’ll suck it and see, but at least it’s a step.

The one thing that keeps me there is community - communities of people who I wouldn’t have been connected with in the real world. But there are other ways of building that outside of one small app that sits on a handheld computer. The thing is, it takes energy and effort and that’s why it’s so easy to be sucked back into that digital vortex.

Alas, we persevere.