it's not social media - it's you & me

lately on the internet (wow as i type that i do feel very 🧓 but bear with me) i often see people posting things like, 'things were better on [social media site]', 'so glad i left [social media site]', 'i hate [social media site] (posted on [social media site])'.

& i can't say i don't sympathise! i've left & joined various social media sites for different reasons - usually there's something about the way it's being run that i no longer agree with so i want to go somewhere that fits with my own personal values better.

but i think sometimes this has an issue of conflating the social media site itself with the people who are using it, & what people don't seem to get is that a lot of the times, what we don't like about a certain place on the internet is not the place itself, but the way people interact in it.

there's nothing wrong with that! sometimes you go to a new club & it's just not your jive. but if you took everyone in that club & took them to a new club, you probably wouldn't like the new club either.

i have some friends who really enjoyed a social media site that i also liked at first, but then i found myself in a situation where i had to deal with the moderation & the whole experience was unpleasant enough that it turned me off the whole site. so when my friends talk about the great time they had there, it definitely makes me think, 'wow, it's like we were in two different clubs.'

meanwhile, i have had generally awesome interactions overall on a different social media site, but i know many people who've had various issues with it - & i think that if i'd had the same experiences they did, i wouldn't like the site either! but i hadn't.

the key difference is who we actually interact with on these sites. (& i think we actually have more choice in this than we often think we do.)

i was talking with somebody about the social media sites we first really got "into" - myspace & livejournal came up - & it made me think about the first internet community i really made friends in.

i used to write a lot of fanfiction (i'm more of a reader now) & somebody who'd made a forum for a fandom i wrote in asked if i'd join. i did, & i probably spent more time on that forum than anywhere else on the internet for most of my teenage years.

i can't remember who, but somebody on the forum started a livejournal, & then a bunch of us joined up too.

then it was tumblr, & again, a bunch of us joined up too.

some people branched off to dreamwidth, some to twitter, some to plurk (do people still remember plurk???). some people connected on more 'real life'-adjacent spaces like skype for video calls, facebook with actual photos. a fair number of us have met offline in various locations in the world.

a small number of us now chat mostly on a small discord server. others have created their own spaces elsewhere.

but wherever we went, i was always happy to be - because it wasn't the site we were on that mattered, but the people.

in that vein, on social media, i'm very quick to mute/block, & i'm rather slow to follow, because just because you're at a club doesn't mean you have to interact with everybody there! i feel annoyed that i feel like i even have to state this, but if i mute or block somebody it doesn't mean i hate them - i just don't want to see their posts or have them interact with me online. similarly, if i don't follow somebody, it doesn't mean i don't like them - i just don't want to see their posts on my timeline all the time.

but i often see people interacting in ways on social media that they just don't seem happy about, & it makes me think - why? why do people feel this need to reply even if it'll just frustrate them? why do they keep posting when they don't even want to? why do people try to connect with people they don't even seem to want any connection with?

i think there isn't any one online space that will be perfect for anyone, but we make up the online spaces we're in. i think we're capable of creating our own pockets of community anywhere, but at the same time, a lot of the faults of the spaces we see online aren't inherent to the space, but the community that grew there. so moving from one site to another won't change anything, if the community & its values move with you. similarly, just because one community that you don't jive with is on a site doesn't mean you have to write the whole site off - you can just interact with & be a part of other communities that you actually like there.

mostly the reason i'm writing this post is because i feel like i see people saying things like all social media is bad or one social media site is worse than another & that people should go to another specific site where the grass is greener & the water is sweeter - but i think if we bring all our old hangups & don't actually confront the ways we're making our community spaces online feel hostile to us, it'll just be the same old cycle.

anyway, social media. it does suck a lot of the time! but maybe we are the reason it sucks, & we can also be the reason it sucks a little less.