Own Your Platform

This is an add-on post to my Substack rant from a few days ago. On 404 Media Jason Kobler writes:

X’s Objection to the Onion Buying InfoWars Is a Reminder You Do Not Own Your Social Media Accounts.

Use social media as a way to DISTRIBUTE the content you’re building, but do not BUILD your brand and community on these platforms.

That a corporate social media company says it owns the social media accounts on its service is probably not surprising. Meta, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, and ByteDance have run up astronomical valuations by more or getting people to fill their platforms with content for free, and have created and destroyed countless businesses, business models, and industries with their constantly-shifting algorithms and monetization strategies. But to see this fact outlined in such stark terms in a court document makes clear that, for human beings to seize any sort of control over their online lives, we must move toward decentralized, portable forms of social media and must move back toward creating and owning our own platforms and websites.

Substack grew out of the Y Combinator startup accelerator cave. It’s cut from the same cloth as all these other special media platforms listed above. They are just a few years behind the others in “cashing in for their investors”. Give it time.