Let me preface this by saying we are nowhere near perfect, the tech oligarch tentacles are everywhere, and it’s going to be a long and ongoing and imperfect process for us all to feel good about the tools and the companies we’re supporting in this increasingly dystopian landscape, both online and IRL.

That said, if you’re freaking out a little about the fact that Meta ended fact-checking on all its social media platforms (I mean, did they ever actually check a fact?), removed protections for queer and trans people from its Hateful Conduct policy and has a CEO who has become an unabashed (he was maybe just a little bashed before) shill for America’s Cheetoh in Chief, there are options. We can make choices.

This isn’t exactly a hot take. Lots of people have written lots of things about why they are or aren’t leaving Meta. This is more like an attempt to offer some support in making your choices right now. I’d love to one day write the definitive guide to freeing yourself from both Meta and Google, but that day is not to-day. One step at a time is how we get where we’re going.

How to decide? The same way we decide anything

I’m all about decision-making processes these days, and I’m in the middle of hashing out several such processes in different areas of my life (thank you, co-op living) so it makes sense to apply a framework we’re already familiar with to help make these internet decisions. Can we put this one through our four-step, human-centred design framework? Let’s try it.

Solve the right problem

Already one of the reasons we’re focusing on blog posts instead of a robust and detailed social media marketing strategy is that we own our website and our email list, which gives us more control over who we reach and results in less buffeting by the whims of the conservative shills who own the platforms. (Also we’re millennials and get tired just thinking about video content, though we may have to revisit the benefits of TikTok as a platform. But I digress.)

Before we leave a platform we need a firm grasp on why we’re using it in the first place and what it does for us. In our case, Instagram is a bridge from a large collection of internet users and our own website. It gives us a chance to look for people who are picking up what we’re putting down, and invite them to the platform where we can share more of what we want to share, the way we want to share it. It takes a large but unfocused audience and filters it into a much smaller but much more focused and aligned audience. It doesn’t take up too much of our time so we can focus on creating more long form content and playing to our strengths.

So the replacement platform needs to give us access to a large and diverse audience for free, and allow content-sharing that is primarily text and photo based.

Focus on People

The cardinal rule of any plan, marketing or otherwise, is that it has to be doable by the people who have to do it. With that in mind, would TikTok be a good replacement for us? Probably not. We’d have to get up the gumption to make videos at all, and then learn the various skills required to make them look and sound half decent. That sounds very time consuming, and therefore does not solve the “doesn’t take too much time” arm of the problem we identified in step one.

So how about Bluesky, the Twitter dupe that claims to be open and decentralized and committed to re-establishing the protections and backstops of the social media of yore. It’s text-based but allows for image-sharing, and even has one significant advantage over Instagram in Canada — it allows link sharing. We love to share a link!

In addition to working for your skill set, I do think it’s important that your strategies have to work for your soul. Which is dramatic, I know, but it’s also kind of the central question we’re all asking right now.

A few years ago I moved our web hosting from Bluehost to DreamHost (who is coming up with these names) after learning that Bluehost helped fund a campaign in California to strike down marriage equality for queer people. Not cool in any universe, but since one half of Flegg Creative, and a higher-than-average proportion of FC clients, are queer, it hit especially close to home. I started this ongoing process of moving away from Google after October 7, 2023 when I learned that the company is not merely passively complicit in the genocide of Palestine, it is actively facilitating it.

You can decide what trade-offs you’re willing to make. Does Bluesky have a significantly smaller user base than Instagram? Yes. Does participating in Bluesky do less damage to your psyche on account of at least having a policy that doesn’t permit hate speech (we’ll see how it plays out in practice)? Quite possibly also yes.

Think in Systems

In our previous post we talked about how this step is very much about knowing who is in your ecosystems and what are the links between them. In this case, we can ask questions like, who do we need to reach, how many people to we need to reach, and where are they likely to be?

The people on Instagram who were into our message and likely to click from our account to our website, where are they headed? Based on my feed, the vast majority of people who have stated they’re leaving Meta have also stated they’re moving to Bluesky, not LinkedIn or Mastadon or Discord. LinkedIn posts might suit my long form habits a little better than Bluesky, but it probably makes sense to pick a replacement platform that exists within the ecosystem of the people I need to reach.

With everyone scrambling to figure out what to do and what platforms suit them best, it could take some time and some experimentation to find out the answers to these questions. This in an informative post by @theindigenousanarchist about the various numbers and affiliations and uses of a handful of Meta alternatives, and it’s a great example of doing the research to understand where the people in your system are likely to head, and what needs they’ll be looking fulfill with different platforms.

Test and Try Again.

None of this is set in stone, so why not try it out and see if it works? We know what we’re hoping to get out of it, so we can look to the right metrics to measure progress. Web traffic is a simple one. I hypothesize that if we make this transition our web traffics from social media will drop for a bit as we build a following on a new platform and give people a chance to find us. If we follow our plan and post on our schedule and engage with this new platform, I suspect our traffic will start to go back up. It’ll take time, so I’ll set a timeframe of probably three months before jumping to any conclusions or making any other big changes. If this move doesn’t ultimately work out, we’ll take what we’ve learned and keep searching for the right platform or the right method.

Nobody is perfect, and perfection is not a reasonable standard to hold yourself to, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be always on the lookout for new things to try and new ways to improve. The more you know, the more options you’ll have.

Let us know what your process has been for making these decisions, and if you’ve found new platforms or communities that you love. (And of course, follow us on Bluesky @fleggcreative.bsky.social)