Community

For many years I would go for a hike, a via ferrata, scuba diving and more and I would take photos. I would then share them on Instagram to friends, colleagues and family. Facebook then bought Instagram and within a few months it went from being a social network built around our friends, colleagues and family to a network of influencers sharing irrelevant trash. Between that trash we would get ads. Within half a year I dumped Facebook controlled Instagram because the community that I used Instagram had been deliberately destroyed.

Yesterday, spontaneously I joined a group for a ride to the Tour de France Femme via Strava. The day before that I meant one group via Meetup for a bike ride from Geneva, and a second via Strava for a run. The meetup group, to the best of my knowledge has no strava group.

Every single other group I know does and I find this intolerably frustrating but let’s focus on the positive first. The positive is that I had no runs for the first time in weeks, so I decided to revert to the cycling staple. In so doing I had a pleasant, quiet morning ride to Geneva with barely any cars, before having a group ride to Crans.

On the Fediverse you can follow everyone on an instance, or you can follow the people that you want to follow. Hypothetically you can follow key words, and with time follow more people, and eventually find a community.

On Threads, BlueSky, X, Instagram and TikTok what you see is selected by algorithms, so you don’t need to follow anyone because every time you scroll or refresh you will be fed something new.

France and Belgium have recently banned children and teenagers younger than 15 from joining social media. To me this illustrates that my desire for social media to be social networks that were feature rich is dead and buried. In effect it has been dead and buried since Lockdown got normal people to join social media, including Whatscrapp. (Intentional spelling)

The issue, which I highlighted back in 2008 or so is that social media has always been seen as a tool for marketers, advertisers, PR teams and utilitarian people. For me social networks, and social media, when they came of age, should have been about providing an online third space for communities to come together, meet chat, and then with familiarity and friendship meet in the physical world, rather than just intellectual plain.

I was thinking of taking a break from Whatsapp for three weeks. I have this desire, and need because I am tired of how people use Whatsapp. They create groups, where strangers are added. People with no deep knowledge of online communities delete posts that are sometimes not spam. Other people complain when people try to have conversations. The result is that WhatsApp is emotionally draining because it doesn’t feel like a healthy, tight knit community.

The more I use Whatsapp, in the Post pandemic age, the more toxic I find it. Last night I wrote something innocent. I wrote about rotisserie chicken and the temptation to have some before drinks. So far, so normal.

Someone I never met, and never talked with, in person, put a crying emoji and I don’t remember whether there was a comment or not. I wrote about how plants and trees have distress signals too, and that we should worry about their emotions too. There was a response but I never saw it because my response and another were deleted.

Before Whatsapp was bought by Facebook it was a great platform for people to chat with family and friends. When Facebook bought Whatsapp, many people, including myself, migrated towards Signal to avoid remaining in the Facebook sphere of influence. Social groups, and their luddites remained on Whatsapp, so we had to revert to using Facebook owned Whatsapp.

GoSocial takes this a step further. GoSocial is a community that has a facebook page that no one can chat on, and GoSocial town groups that no one can write within. In order to write anything you need to find an activity of interest, join the chat, and then you can do the car dance.

Yesterday’s moderate recovery ride was hard. It was hard because we were riding at up to thirty kilometres per hour for sustained periods of time. We were riding fast from Geneva, to Nyon, and then again from Nyon to Geneva. With a small group you can afford to push like this. Witha large group there is no way.

I knew, when I saw that it was a moderate ride, that it would be slightly more challenging than an easy ride. In my eyes it would almost count as a challenging or peak ride.

A few days ago someone wrote something about chocolate croissants. I then wrote something about Chocolate easter bunnies. A third person then said “please don’t have conversations, there are hundreds of people reading this exchange”. This is on WhatsApp. WhatsApp is, or at least was, an IM client. For those of a certain age an IM client is a conversation app. It’s the type of app that includes AIM, ICQ, Messenger, Skype and many, many more apps. Its raison d’être is to encourage conversations.

In the golden age of social media I went from tweeting with a pseudonym to tweeting with my own name. This was as true on Twitter as on Facebook. There was a sense of community that meant that we were safe to use our own names, rather than nicknames.

That age ended in 2020 when normal people, isolated by lockdowns, became familiar with Twitter and other social networks. In 2020 I was flamed more than once on Twitter, and eventually became private, after using a pseudonym. I was also flamed more than once on Mastodon instances and dumped them too.