Like a lot of chronically online people, I’ve been thinking a lot about how I use platforms (loosely defined as anywhere someone else builds a tool where users make the content) lately.
At Grace Hopper (a women in tech conference) in 2010, I sat in on a presentation from the tech team at Facebook who had recently built some of the features that enabled their “real name policy”. If you don’t remember that policy, it came down to this: Facebook strongly believed that cyberbullying wouldn’t happen if people had to show up with their real names. They neglected to consider all the reasons people couldn’t “prove” a name, and went way too far in enabling others to report your “false” name, so if you remember this policy, you almost certainly remember it as a thing that disproportionately affected trans people & maybe even enabled others to bully them.
Great job, Facebook.
It seems safe to say they were proven wrong. I’d hazard a guess that the real name policy wasn’t about bullying at all, but about increasing the value of their already extensive data about users.
Maybe they didn’t know that 15 years ago! In that session, we had a rousing, friendly debate about identity online, and for me, those ideas have clarified over time.
I want two things from online identity:
- Credibility in the commons – understanding what the person you’re talking to knows, who believes them, what credentials they have. Building your own credibility by connecting to experts and being recognized as knowledgeable (whether that’s about local music, gardening, gay pirates or the future of the climate).
- Safety in walled gardens – being able to explore without damaging that public credibility, knowing you’re among friends, and cultivating spaces that create various degrees of privacy and secrecy. Everyone needs a place to shout and cry and crack jokes you don’t want your colleagues to see, and the internet has been that place for me many times.
There are tons of ways people use identity online, and even more applications of them – but these are the ones that matter most to me.
A brief history of 20+ years of internet identity
When I started playing online in the late 1900s and early 2000s, most of the internet felt like you could find anything and be anyone.
I met fellow queer strangers and developed my sense of identity in the early days of chat rooms like Paradox. I had an E/N site for several years, ran a feminist webzine (both mostly anon). I joined community sites to connect with other dancers around the world (anyone remember Tribe.net? was it before or after MySpace?).
For a brief period, I was an anonymous rockstar on WHQuestion, a precursor to Reddit – or worse, maybe Quora (not anon enough; like every femme-presenting person online, a couple dudes found my phone number because they felt we “really connected”). I had a short stint as a feminist agitator on Slashdot (not particularly anon; I did that for work). Good times. Ha!
My favorite, by far, experience was part of the walled garden of Livejournal – which was a blogging platform that gave you fine-grain control over how people could interact with you. I have 20-year friendships that started on LJ and a ton of acquaintanceships I cherish (looking at you, Feminist Rage community).
When Livejournal fell apart, people I knew as Real Human Friends all followed each other to Facebook. People I knew from fandom and broader community sorta moved to Twitter, Tumblr (which has the advantage of being more user-centric), plus Archive of Our Own (which is effectively a representative democracy) spun up around then. I didn’t and don’t have time to follow everyone everywhere, alas.
So I mostly moved to Facebook, where they have consistently had almost none of the values of democracy and community that I want… but they did build enough critical mass to become effectively a communications utility.
I’ve tried using Mastodon, LinkedIn and Twitter as a formal commons, for professional insight and local political action, and anonymously for hobby projects. Mastodon has never really had the critical mass it needed, LinkedIn is a nice place to learn from former colleagues – but you wade through a lot of marketing and machine-generated content, and Twitter… well, we all know how that went.
Where I’m going (or staying)
I’m revisiting Dreamwidth (me there – not a lot of public posts) as a walled garden, for thoughts not ready for public consumption. Here’s why I still, tentatively, think Dreamwidth is a good platform: like Livejournal, if DW starts to fall apart, it’s reasonably replicable and the cost to leave is low.
I’m trying to treat Bluesky (me there – endeavoring not to make it a tool for generating rage) as a way to find people and ideas that I then cultivate elsewhere. It’s at its best as a tool for ephemeral, shared learning. It’s a decent commons and an unhelpful place to store your travel photos. I’m hesitant about going all-in on Bluesky.
We haven’t figured out a replacement for Facebook/Meta-as-communications-utility, but that’s ok. Meta has been steadily enshittifying its useful features to the point where it’s normal to see event announcements two days after the thing happened, to miss your Real Human Friends’ birthdays, and the humans are vastly outnumbered by bots chatting to bots promoting bots who profit off of bots.
We don’t need that. And we’ll figure out other solutions for what we do need.