Claire's Journal

and maybe why you shouldn't care

The slow decline of the social media world is upon us finally. We all knew that eventually corporate greed would drive us here.

Recently upon logging into a dormant X account in a feeble attempt to find someone from my past I discovered the horrifying truth of the most recent developments in social media.

Not only is X only full of a few delusional people still hanging on to what little credibility this platform still affords them. They are doing so under heavy fire. AI is destroying the platform. A clear lack of guidelines when it comes to post content and style are making the platform completely unreadable.

I'm an active participant in the Bluesky ecosystem but recently like many others have been experiencing massive amounts of downtime spanning as long as an entire week with large portions of it unavailable during that time. In addition numbers here are down, way down.... like 27% year over year. Perhaps Bluesky isn't quite dead yet but it's certainly not looking good.

Then there is YouTube.

I'm a long time user of YouTube. YouTube used to be about you the user of the platform. Then it was about influencers. Now it seems to be about the automated wholesale rip off of any content posted to the platform by AI bots which steal transform and even translate content made by others.

It's pretty awful especially in special interest community's like various art communities are now effectively dead with their best content is from 5 years ago. You add to this the ever increasingly unintelligible “algorithm” pushing all the AI slop clones to the top it's becoming impossible to find even that.

There is a trend however.

It may not be totally popular yet but there is a trend forming especially among younger people of migrating away from these platforms and into the arena of self-hosting and other third-party alternatives. You are using one such alternative right now in order for me to write this and for you to then read it.

Why is this happening now?

The over commoditization of services especially those surrounding the interaction between human beings is saturating the market. AI is compounding the saturation while simultaneously degenerating the entire user experience. Humans are often no longer in either the decision making or programming process when it comes to how software is designed or coded. Coupled with a lack of desire to innovate over iterate and the endless pipeline of needless AI use cases which are eroding every part of tech.

Enough is enough. It's time to put your foot down and enjoy free software. You've earned it buddy. Make your life happy again, release yourself from the shackles of someone else's political agenda.