4 ms·
This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ag
by alisonatwork 10mo ago
This situation is so frustrating to me, and despite my attempts, nobody seems to get why it's problematic. I still have a Facebook account from over a decade ago that I use occasionally to access stuff that is only visible on Facebook, but by the time Insta kicked off I had already decided social media was bad, so I never got one, and it didn't seem like a great loss because I wasn't that interested in looking at other people's photos anyway.
Except now, apparently - and I'm still not exactly sure how - business owners and activist groups and event promoters communicate everything about what is going on via... photos?! I suppose it's the digital version of flyers, except you could see flyers posted up all over town, in all the record stores or cafes you already frequented, friends could hand you them when they saw you out and about, you'd get bombarded with them when you left related events... And none of those situations forced you to enter a heavily-surveilled gated community owned by a spectacularly wealthy foreign company notorious for enabling genocide, live streaming murder etc.
I was at some event a couple weekends ago and an organizer came up to me saying that there was going to be an after and just check the Insta for the address, and I'm like... But I don't have that? Can't you tell me now? And because the site is login-walled even when at some point later in the day the thumbnail did appear, trying to click on it to see the details resulted in the login block and so I missed out.
But I am well aware that I am a teeny tiny minority of people involved in this boycot and so I'm only really hurting myself. The way I've heard it described by activists is that using Insta (or X or YouTube) is like tacitly accepting that we already live in a panopticon and thus all resistance has to take place within full view of the authorities, it just needs to be smart and present itself as something that isn't actually resistance, or that works around censorship using codewords, or this, or that, "just like how it's done in China". And it's like, great, the new generation of western activists who actually still live in a society which grants them some civil liberties have decided they're all doomed to exist under the totalitarian jackboot and practice their resistance accordingly. After all, you can't build a movement out there on the actually free fediverse or the small web where there's only a smattering of nerds.
I don't know if I should be depressed or just suck it up and get that stupid Insta account.
- alex1138 10mo agoFacebook simultaneously makes it hard for you to access anything without an account (connecting the world?) while also having been known to change people's privacy settings from Friends to Friends of Friends or Public Zuck, you do not deserve to be spoken of in the same breath as actual internet pioneers
- Dusseldorf 10mo agoI'm on the same boat as you. Trying to find word about where the good local popup restaurants are, and apparently the only way to do it is to follow a bunch of random Instagram accounts. I finally tried to relent and make an account just to be able to read that stuff, but they wanted me to take a video of myself holding my government ID in order to prove my... identity, I guess? Not sure why that's necessary for an account I never even plan to post with, but it was enough of a barrier for me that I said nevermind. Now I just mention it whenever I'm chatting with organizers/proprietors, but I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative.
- staplers 10mo agobut I'm never exactly sure what to suggest as an alternative. Email newsletters are pretty easy and universal.
- efreak 10mo agoEmail newsletters are easy until you want to self-host and between Gmail, live, etc only 2/3 of providers will receive your messages at all and this one guy uses a corporate email address for everything for some reason and their antivirus blocks half the messages you send out despite none of them having attachments or suspicious links, even the ones that have no links at all. Then someone finds your personal email address to tell you that every time they try to confirm their email address by sending back the broken string, your server refuses the connection, so they can't even with up, and they've been trying for months. Meanwhile, someone's spamming people with fake emails sent (spoofed) from your server and opf rules are causing a transactional email sent to your own inbox for every rejected email, and you've given up on trying to respond to any real messages because you just can't find them.