It’s officially 2026, and I’ve decided that this is the year we should set ourselves free from tech corporations!
I’ve written a lot on this website in the past about my decision to leave X/Twitter and all Meta platforms in late 2024. Once upon a time, Twitter was actually my favorite social platform. The notion of “microblogging,” the method of posting intentionally short updates, was incredibly simple but also surprisingly powerful. After more notable individuals and organizations started joining the platform, you would see breaking news and historical events unfold right before your eyes. It became something that is often described as a “digital town square.” Being a Twitter user sometimes meant knowing what was happening in the news before it was in the news.
Today, the biggest problem with Twitter (which was rebranded as X) is that the small company that created it grew into a bigger company that was then bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion in 2022. When that happened, and before he even enacted any of his changes, you could see the writing on the wall. He eliminated thousands of employees, created privacy concerns by practically disabling the ability to fully “block” other users, and launched the AI chatbot Grok, which Musk himself described as an alternative to “woke” chatbots like ChatGPT. Grok is, in itself, also problematic. It has a history of churning out political misinformation, antisemitic remarks, and highly inappropriate deepfake images. It’s a real mess over there, so can you really blame me for looking toward bluer skies???
But here’s the thing: Social media doesn’t need to be a monolith!
I know that by this point, email is pretty much an old standard way of communicating with one another. It’s boring, but it’s the standard for a reason. And that reason is that not everyone’s email is through the same company. I personally still use Gmail, Google’s free email service. But you might still use an old Yahoo! or even an old Hotmail or AOL address? No matter whose server our email resides on, we can still send mail to one another. It doesn’t even really matter what comes after that @ symbol! And I believe that we need more social media services and platforms to function this way, too! Why? Because if one day, AOL decides that it’s going to just disappear into the ether like its once-popular dial-up internet service, email as a whole won’t go with it. And if a billionaire like Elon Musk decides he wants to try and purchase the entirety of Google? Well, you can always move your account elsewhere. (Nobody asked, but I recommend Proton!)
Some folks think that I’ve moved from Twitter to Bluesky because I just wanted to join an “echo chamber” of like-minded Democratic-leaning individuals after Trump got re-elected to office. And while the rhetoric on Twitter was definitely getting nastier, and Bluesky’s community is much lighter, the constantly-shifting political landscape was hardly the only reason for my departure. You see, we suddenly have options when things aren’t ruled over by one singular billionaire or one singular tech megacorp. I generally see tech and gaming-related posts in my feed on Bluesky. To help users get accustomed to what they want to see in their feeds, they also allow users to set up lists and “starter packs” of accounts related to their particular interests. This results in a much warmer reception than the hateful comments paid blue checkmarks are known to put out into most Twitter feeds.
And fortunately, Bluesky is a distributed social network powered by the same protocol as several other really cool web apps like Frontpage.fyi, Bookhive, WhiteWind, Leaflet, and more. Mastodon, another decentralized microblogger, takes it a step further and allows anyone to host their very own server instance. You just join one of hundreds of Mastodon’s servers, whichever one you think is the best fit for you, and you’re still able to follow, like, and communicate with anyone on any other “federated” Mastodon server.
At the end of the day, you don’t have to disappear from the internet or scrub your presence from it. If Twitter or Facebook or whatever other evil social media giants are starting to get a little too weird or stressful for you to manage and their content moderation teams/algorithms/AI/whatever else seems like they couldn’t care less, there are still ways to preserve your digital footprint. Ways that allow you to break free from the oligarchy and interact online without the ruckus. And who among us wouldn’t want that?