2024-01-24

Micro.blog is a business not a community

Rather than get into the details of the recent (and ongoing) dust-up between Manton, Vincent and Adam it occured to me that it might be more helpful to write about something no-one (that I've seen) has mentioned. Stepping back and viewing it from a distance it looks like a problem of CIS white men building businesses that purport to create "communities". Frame it up in that context and the idea starts to seem absurd. There are now several of these blog services-as-communities that have been created over the past few years. Each purports to offer a friendly, safe "community" that is also a part of the open web. It's meant to be an alternative to the silos of corporate microblogging services that are subject to the rule of more powerful CIS white men.

You can probably see where I'm going with this.

I've been using micro.blog since 2018 and I became a paying customer a couple years ago when I became frustrated with hosting on WordPress. But I knew right-off that online spaces owned and ruled by individuals cannot be communities. But more to the point, they would be reflective of the stated values and unstated priorities of the owner. At the end of the day, it is a space subject to rules created by a business owner selling a service. They might have the best of intentions or they might not. We can only see what we see from the outside. But make no mistake, it's theirs not ours. We may own our words in our blogs but they own the social network that differentiates the space from standard blog hosting.

I appreciate the time and effort Manton has put into building Micro.blog. Countless hours and commitment, I would never want such a responsibility. But ultimately it is a for-profit business, it's not a community. The same could be said of the other new blog services that offer easy-to-get started blog hosting with variations of community timelines and blog discovery. They're all (to my knowledge) businesses owned by CIS white men.

I see a few people who host on micro.blog currently casting about for alternatives. Some have mentioned Pika and Bear, both of which look like great blog hosting services. But at the end of the day, unless you are hosting your blog on a computer in your actual home that you can see with your eyes, you're going to be paying a for-profit company to host for you. They may or may not have values or engage in practices that you don't agree with.

The real messy bit is when we tie our blogs into services that try to offer additional features of discovery, timelines and proprietary commenting. That's when the business owner and HIS priorities and HIS value system begin to shape our human social experience. When we invest our time and communication in the neighborhood infrastructure that is solely owned by one CIS white guy we should expect that it will be an experience mediated by his design and values. And though we've all been calling these spaces communities I think we would be better served to re-contextualize them. Real community spaces cannot be owned and defined by one person. These are social networks and that's all.

What to do? Over the past year I began to reckon with the fact that I wasn't connecting with people at Micro.blog. This was not a space I fit into and while I admire Manton's commitment to helping people publish on the open web, I also recognized that I had some reservations about the affect of publishing in the context of a social network only he defines so I began the process of moving my blog back to my original host and have mostly transitioned my conversations to Mastodon. Mastodon can also be a messy place but it feels more open and more reflective of humanity while also not being a free-for-all. I have an account on social.coop which runs as a democratic co-op and, importantly, the parameters of who I can find and interact with are not defined by one person. At the moment it seems to me that the Fediverse and specifically Mastodon, seems like the most open, self definable non-corporate, decentralized option for engaging with people online.

A final note, of the various posts I've read about the specific situation I mentioned at the beginning of this post I'd suggest reading what Holly and Annie wrote. Both are excellent and dig in to what's going on.


I don't have comments but I love email or you can find me on Mastodon.

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