A lot, if not most of lemmings moved out of reddit at this point, out of pure spite, particularly due to reddit rug-pulling their public API and therefore breaking all the third party integrations that many developers spent hundreds of work-hours creating.
Speaking for myself, Reddit was the last straw I needed to swear off from corporate social media. Soon after I shut down my Xitter account, and stopped logging in to Facebook altogether. Network effects be damned. Discord is the only service I am still using and only because I still run the AI Horde & Godot Card Game Engine chats there since 2020. The Divisions by zero chats were set up on Matrix instead.
These days I explicitly avoid registering and using social media that is proprietary, or backed by venture capital. I’m not helping to make another billionaire off my content. I don’t want to be nobody else’s product!
Where am I going with this? Well, today I run into this meme and it got some thinky juices flowing. You see I was an atheist when I was around 15, when I managed to start shedding off the intense Orthodox Christian propaganda I was swimming in until then. But once I became an atheist, no other religions were tempting. It’s not like Islam, Catholicism and whatnot became more interesting. Once I became an atheist, it was like an inoculation in my brain, where no other religious memes1 could take hold.
I believe most atheists are similar. Once your brain manages to reject religious brainwashing, it’s very difficult for anything like it to take hold. It’s like a generic vaccination. And while there’s plenty non-denomination people who keep “shopping around”, so-to-say, or just stay generically “spiritual”, a lot of those remain agnostic, rather than capital-A Atheists.
This is exactly how it worked for me with the Fediverse as well. Once I got radicalized enough to swear off corporate social media, I am not going back, no matter how many carrots you swing in front of my nose. In fact, I’ve been burnt so much that I am inherently suspicious of whatever service I’m using that is not open sourced as well.
This has some striking similarities to how people who switch exclusively to non-corporate social media, like the fediverse, act. Our brain has likewise been inoculated to reject things which aim to treat us as products, and there’s just no going back. As the percentage of people who think like us grows, and accelerates due to the massive enshittification of corporate social media, each new version of such media will have less and less people to tap into. Those of us already on the fediverse, will refuse to switch to new fancier versions of the same product, even if they present themselves as fresh or as underdogs, like the new Digg, or whatever new shit Jack Dorsey poops out.
Eventually mega-corps will understand this, and will try to co-opt this movement like Google did to email, with gmail, or like Meta is attempting to do with Threads, but for those of us who reject the capitalist owners of such social media, it’s not just enough to use the same protocols, or even to be open source. Our rejection goes deeper than that.
I can’t foresee how this will all turn out, especially in the current interesting times we’re living in, but I remain convinced that a hard core of us will always remain that will never change our minds about this. And a few millions of us to remaining steadfast is all that is needed to maintain interconnected social media that cannot be rug-pulled from us anymore.
- I’m using the original meaning of meme here: A virus of the mind. ↩︎