Originally written on 20250228
I seem to remember a cartoon, the wry sort of thing the New Yorker magazine used to run (despite searching, I haven't yet found it), in which a pig in a farm pen is talking to a wary, lean boar standing outside the fence. The caged pig says to wild boar "but the farmer cares for us and feeds us so well!" to explain why it's not interested in jumping the fence.
I've I think about that a lot in this era of mainstream social media scions getting a bit big for their britches and challenging the world order. They use their centralised, profit-motivated, surveillance-fuelled, hyper-manipulative & wilfully addictive services to both line their pockets, and to exert massive influence over our societies in their exclusive self-interest.
In the mainstream social media, like Facebook and Twitter, people are increasingly talking about boycotts and even threatening to leave the platform. Some have (out of the frying pan, into the fire, mostly), and others state their desire to do so, but reject the practicalities: the alternatives - especially the Fediverse which I actively promote on Facebook (it's the primary reason I still access Facebook!) - are 'too hard', or 'not user-friendly enough' for non-technical users.
Oh my sweet summer children! I'm intrigued by that latter group. They want to be seen to be disgusted by the owners of these social media behemoths, but are unwilling to put any effort into the act of upping stakes and leaving.
From my perspective, they don't 'get' the whole economy - the purpose- of mainstream social media: to commandeer your attention, and to mine your metadata providing gold to advertisers. The perverse incentive is precisely what the farmer does for the pig - keeps it blissfully happy (if woefully ignorant) by feeding its addictions and baser nature, like curating outrage and simplistic conflict.
And to ensure that everyone participates, they use the Network Effect (the value of belonging to the network increases as more people join it) and heavily researched inculcation, aka 'onboarding'. What makes it so easy to use Facebook or Twitter? They've invested hundreds of millions of dollars optimising the process. How could they justify such a huge investment in refining the process? Return on investment for their shareholders. The rare incredulous mainstream social media user will note that their exit and export process has enjoyed no such investment. A basic understanding of the investments make it obvious why.
So social media users who make the bizarre statement "I want to leave this depraved social media platform, but I'll only do it when the alternatives are as user friendly as this one is" are merely demonstrating their total lack of awareness of how they've been played - and dumbed down in the process.
Doing the right thing is almost never as easy as doing the wrong thing. But doing the right thing is vastly more rewarding in the long run. It's a lesson all of us need to learn.
'But the farmer feeds us so well', said the pig.
The Fediverse is a decentralised global parallel social media universe. It's made up of a myriad of community-run, non-profit, open source (libre) web services which comprise locally-hosted analogues to all the current mainstream social media flavours. That includes Friendica (Facebook), Mastodon (Twitter), Lemmy & Piefed (Reddit), PixelFed (Instagram), among others. Some other non-Fediverse libre options include Signal (WhatsApp), and Matrix (MS Teams/Slack).