It feels weird to say goodbye to a social media network — especially one which I studied so much during grad school… but it was time (heck it should have been time many months previous, but I was having a heck of a time pulling my history in zip file format and I wanted that for myself before I pulled it all down. Having left, I don’t actually miss it as it became toxic long ago. I miss reading certain people’s posts of course (not everyone is on Bluesky or any of the other social media networks that I’m still on… nor am I necessarily super active consistently on many if not most)… but such is life in this era of the enshittification of the Internet.
Lest all my posts become some sort of bah humbug of complaints (and my longer form blog posts are pretty few and far between as it is right now) I think I’ll reminisce a bit about some of the positive experiences I did once have on this network:
- Meeting up in person with folks in the local community surrounding this social network in the heyday of it in my city. If it wasn’t for this I never would have met the person who would once be my realtor nor would I have been able to experience quite the same local food scene as I did. It’s not super frequent that I’ve met people through a social media network rather than my knowing people first in “real life” but this network was conducive to this for sure.
- Following and getting to learn more about authors, small name celebrities, and other people I actually genuinely wanted to know more about.
- Receiving an award at an academic conference for having posted the most about the conference itself while it was going on. It was nice to be rewarded for this and help disseminate knowledge beyond the confines of the lectures I was attending myself, honestly.
- Staying in touch with folks with whom I otherwise have/had no other contact information. I mean I may still know their names and/or have emails for them but email is so inconsistently used or replied to these days (physical snail mail is even LESS often used or replied to despite my adherence to sending it — what with strikes and whatnot, there’s no guarantee things get where they need to get promptly).
- Actually feeling in the know on various news items (especially niche and local news). This is something that I feel is somewhat lacking in other social networks (especially in Canada where one cannot post news to Facebook for example). As toxic as this network is now, it once was the go-to place for this kind of thing.
And so there goes my somewhat of a eulogy to what this network once was to me. It doesn’t need to be named — many people already know what it is/was. It need not be named. I miss what it once was to me, but I’ve drifted away for obvious reasons.