Do what thou whilt shall be the whole of the law.
So, Discord is down* and with it I’m cut off from the bulk of the people I know and care about. I don’t have all their phone #s, nor have them on any other platform for one reason or another. It’s pretty isolating if I’m being honest. It’s moments like these where I’m forced to reconcile with the problems of trusting the cloud too much. I’ve got far too many contacts who I can talk to through Discord alone. The same goes for Facebook. I have accounts on other platforms but those platforms don’t get as much use as Discord and Facebook do. Of course, there’s always going to be that ever-present chicken and the egg dilemma for any alternative social network; My friends are all on a different platform and so this social network no matter how good it is, doesn’t have my friends so why would I focus on it? Relevancy issues like that are a problem with a lot of media in general.
Ironically, the problem is worsened by the influx of alternative platforms. Mastodon, Minds, Diaspora, Librem Social, Bluesky, It’s easy for people to become overwhelmed with options and not know which one is worth more of their time should they decided to go down that route.
There’s also the problem of social media adjacent platforms as well, YouTube being the biggest in this category. Many many attempts have been made to create an alternative to YouTube but none of them have proven very successful because of the chicken and egg problem they overcame by just being in the right place at the right time. Services like Peertube, Flotaplane, Dtube, Odysee, and others generally just can’t keep up with pace and size of the YouTube platform, making YouTube a de-facto monopoly.
I can’t help feeling like we’re putting more and more eggs in one basket and I worry what volatility could be wrought should one of these titans fall. People pour so much of their lives and their time into using these platforms and if it should be suddenly taken away, I imagine it would really hurt those kinds of people, and it would cut you off from friends you didn’t bother adding anywhere else.
I don’t really have an answer for any of this, but it’s something to keep in your mind at least.
Love is the law, love under will.
On Cloud 9,
Vanessa
*Discord is back up now as of this writing.