![]() ![]() I first learned about CounterSocial during research for a recent piece here on solarpunk humanism. And if we found ourselves acclimatizing to the need for “Twitter breaks” to escape the dread of whatever new incendiary hashtag was trending? Whatever new quote-tweet pile-on and flashfire hate-fest was in progress in our interest groups? Well… what was a degree or two more? CounterSocial, and its dissenters, enters my radar This, and genocide-inciting Facebook, were just the waters we had to swim in. When Twitter made history for all the wrong reasons, as part of misinformation campaigns destabilizing the integrity of Western democracy? Or when it became the place that even members of US government were compelled to follow, to keep up with POTUS’s far-too-public public and foreign policy setting? I’d resigned myself to this hot mess. It’s been around since 2017, as a specially curated instance of pre-existing infrastructure, and it has the potential to be so, so much more.įor twelve years, Twitter was a space I maintained to stay apprised of publishing industry news, and to establish myself as a writer. CounterSocial is one of a few forums you might have heard mentioned in the wake of Elon Musk’s declared intent to buy Twitter, but it’s not a replacement. And yet, our fatalist belief in the myth of the dead frog makes a lot more sense after my first week “out” of Twitter, and onto a social media platform unlike any I’d experienced before. The original frog takes a bit longer, but it does hop out. There’s a popular myth about a frog that stays in a pot of gradually heating water until it boils to death. Can we do better than the social media that's dominated Western culture and distorted its democracies for the past decade? CounterSocial says yes-if you're ready for change yourselves.
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