internet migrations are fine
My fiancée is still on some social media, so through her, I am sometimes exposed to the rancid takes and panic on there. In general, the current bans, changes and migrations are hyped up to be some terrible, seismic event meant to split people and destroy communities, which sounds ridiculous to me, with one caveat: I understand that the past decade, online communities have been relatively stable, all things considered, and that there are people who have never known migrations in their time online. Fair enough.
But growing up in the internet of the early 2000s, migrating communities was just... normal. It happened. It even still happened in the past few years.
Entire communities and sub-communities migrated from one forum to the next after disagreements with how it was led. Groups of people met in one online place and then transferred to another to build their own.
People moved their contact lists between MSN, Skype and ICQ. People moved on from national or local social media (in my case, things like schülerVZ, studiVZ, wer-kennt-wen, etc.) to Facebook.
One by one, forums and newsletters transferred to Facebook pages and Facebook groups, people transferred from ICQ or whatever to WhatsApp or equivalents. Communities that formed on IRC moved to TeamSpeak and later moved to Discord.
Livejournal had a massive exodus to Dreamwidth and Tumblr, which also had multiple waves of that to Pillowfort and other platforms after weird policy changes. People went from Digg to Reddit, and after the massive protest over there, people went to create alternative groups and subreddit-alternatives at Lemmy and Tildes.
Would you always lose some people? Sure, but the numbers were very small. People moved where the group moved to, and that's that.
So when people are feeling very strongly about how the current migration away from X, away from Meta, away from TikTok are bound to destroy communities and dramatize it, I don't get it.
It's you who kept each other together, not that platform, and if it was just the platform, then you have absolutely nothing at the core of this community and it's no loss. If you truly have a community, your passion, your interest in one another, your shared goal and topics connect you, not the service. You can do that anywhere. Your community can survive without that platform, but the platform can't survive without you. Tell me, if countless people were able to move all kinds of online communities onto Facebook, why can it not move away from there again? We all learned new tools, had to make new accounts, had to have some initial friction back then too. It shouldn't be a big deal or hindrance. When you love that community and want to keep in touch, you do it. The Cohost people managed too, didn't they?
"We need these spaces to stay connected." No you don't! Whatever fits your community's needs best, there are email newsletters, RSS feeds, Signal, forums, zines, blogs, using or even hosting Mastodon instances, Pixelfed instances and more. You can even use a variety of these options. You may need to put some more effort into actually talking instead of just lurking, and it may break your routines and not be intuitively to use at first, but you get used to it. It's the price you pay for having built your community on something someone else controls and can take away on a whim. It's the price you pay for no longer supporting bullshit that goes against your values, exploits your weaknesses and sells and leaks your data.
Back then, people left and made a new forum when the admin of the old was an asshole in one thread one time, and now people are ready to give up and resign and stay on a platform when a billion dollar company is okay with people calling women property, gay and trans people mentally ill, and likening ethnicities to filth and disease. What happened? Is the addiction that bad?
I have another post that'll drop on the 20th that is related. Because even when you are scared of switching, you have way more pull than you realize.
Edit: I also think this post by thebirdhouse and this section in a blog post by starbreaker lowkey fits.
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Published 18 Jan, 2025