Platforms Are Getting Much Worse

I began my crusade against platforms a few years ago. Multiple things prompted this belief, but Elon Musk’s purchasing of Twitter really opened my eyes.

The night Twitter died, I listened to dozens of people mourn, reflect, and predict exactly what would happen next. While some of those predictions would end up wrong, many who warned about the reduction in free speech and access to journalism ultimately proved correct.

Since then, platforms (either spurred by Musk’s actions or encouraged by them) have collectively gotten worse.

X (the platform formerly known as Twitter) recently filed a brief in the Infowars bankruptcy hearing asserting that it, not you, owns your account. Here’s Jason Koebler at 404 Media:

The legal basis that X asserts in the filing is not terribly interesting. But what is interesting is that X has decided to involve itself at all, and it highlights that you do not own your followers or your account or anything at all on corporate social media, and it also highlights the fact that Elon Musk’s X is primarily a political project he is using to boost, or stifle, specific viewpoints and help his friends. In the filing, X’s lawyers essentially say—like many other software companies, and, increasingly, device manufacturers as well—that the company’s terms of service grant X’s users a “license” to use the platform but that, ultimately, X owns all accounts on the social network and can do anything that it wants with them.

Substack has moved to further lock-in creators by allowing users to follow instead of subscribe. While that is reason enough to leave, the entire platform is designed to legitimize hate speech. Here’s Anil Dash in “Don’t Call it a Substack:”

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by co-opting well-intentioned creators' work in service of cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don't have to take my word for it; Substack's CEO explicitly said they won't ban someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting from on their site, they took down... four of the Nazis. Four. There are countless more now, and they want to use your email newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the cover they need.

Google released a new iOS app feature called Page Annotations that automatically injects new Google links into search results. Imagine finding my site via Google, and instead of being able to click around and read more of my articles, you click links that take you back to Google. Here’s Casey Newton in Platformer:

Automatically transforming text on the web into Google searches and Google ads is bad for a few reasons. One, it loads up web pages with low-value cruft. Two — in the case of page annotations — it forces publishers to opt out if they don’t like it. (And why would they?) And three, it’s a move that once again highlights the way Google sees the web as something to be mined for value, rather than as an independent public good that should be nurtured.

With all of this nonsense, it’s no wonder the Oxford University Press proclaimed brain rot the word of 2024.

These are egregious attempts to control the web. They’d be shocking if they weren’t already normalized. The internet should be open and accessible to everyone, not controlled by billionaires who spend their time poorly covering Lil Jon.

Thankfully, there are still people who believe in an open web. We need to support, use, and pay for alternative platforms that value portability and privacy.

Mastodon is my social media platform of choice. On Mastodon, you own your network, you own your content, and you can do what you want with it.

Bluesky is supposedly decentralized, but the AT Protocol only exists for the service and isn’t available anywhere else. Also, Bluesky recently took funding from crypto folks, so take that as you will.

On the other hand, Mastodon is freely available and cannot be owned by anyone (sorry, Musk). Individual servers can be owned, but if you don’t like that server, Mastodon allows you to take your entire social graph elsewhere. I’ve moved servers several times over the last two years and took all of my followers with me each time. Most didn’t even notice a change.

While Threads is slowly adding ActivityPub support to connect with Mastodon, it remains to be seen if Meta will ever allow account moving. Why would they want us to leave when our very existence on the platform fuels their ad network? And yes, ads are coming to Threads.

I have an account on Threads and Bluesky, but they exist to repost what I share on Mastodon. One of the benefits of owning your web is choosing to Publish on your Own Site and Syndicate Everywhere (POSSE). I get exposure to the private networks on Threads and Bluesky, but I still control my content and social graph.

As I said above, platforms want to own the content you post. I don’t know about you, but the idea of someone else owning my words because I didn’t read the terms of service is downright terrifying.

I spent many years publishing exclusively on Medium, but now I will only publish on my website and syndicate to Medium (or elsewhere). I cannot foresee publishing anywhere I don’t control ever again.

I’ve chosen to publish using a self-hosted version of Ghost (affiliate link), which powers both my website and newsletter distribution. Ghost, like Mastodon, is open-source and freely available, though you can pay for a hosted solution where you let them handle all the server administration.

WordPress is another excellent publishing platform when you self-host. The paid version of WordPress has gotten strange over the last few months, picking fights with other WordPress developers. If I’m using a service to share my work with the world, I don’t want that service at war with the community.

Thankfully, all of that risk can be avoided by self-hosting and building your own website. You don’t have to worry about the terms when you control them!

Google wants to control the entire internet. You know it. I know it. The Department of Justice knows it. So why give Google any power or access to your information?

I’ve been using Kagi for about a year. It’s a paid privacy-focused search engine. The results are fantastic, not filled with “sponsored” results or AI-generated SEO garbage.

Back in June, I wrote the following about Kagi:

The internet should be free. Information should be accessible to everyone without barriers. However, the major companies that control how we access this information are hell-bent on making the internet worse for everyone. The only way around that is to pay for services that respect privacy and provide a quality experience.

Six months later, I’m convinced that Kagi is the search experience everyone deserves. I wish it were free, but I am not naive enough to know that a free version would lead down the same ad-ridden garbage path of its forefathers.

Taking back control of the internet from platforms will not be easy. Their dominance in our lives is overwhelming, but it is not all-consuming. We can break their chains.

When we choose a better version of the internet, we show developers that open, portable, and privacy-focused features matter. We show them that the ability to POSSE matters. We show them that we are not just a means to generate advertising revenue; instead, we are humans looking to connect with each other across borders and languages.

This is the internet I grew up believing was possible, and this is the internet I will continue to fight for.