Personal Digital Sovereignty
Topics: social Twitter social-media TikTok
The other day, I wrote that “One of the reasons I write in my blog is for the pleasure of being able to say ‘I told you so’”. More seriously, I want somewhere to exist on the net where people can find my personal record. I don’t expect this blog ever to achieve mass readership; it’s a snapshot of the contents of my own brain, and that is a niche interest.
Molly White reminds us that, if you are interested in permanence online, there is no real alternative to having a space of your own:
The TikTok ban, the Musk Twitter takeover, the Facebook moderation policy changes, the Republicans’ rapidly intensifying crackdowns on speech… let these be the proof you needed to move anything you care about online to a space you control.
Digital sovereignty is more important than ever.
I have lamented before the loss of “the convenience of being (or finding) @brand on Twitter” — and that included one’s own personal brand. Over the fifteen years I spent on the platform, I built up a certain reputation, and people could look me up and see that I had earned credibility over that period, an eon in Internet time.
And then it was all gone. I have now deleted my account, but I did that because the credibility was gone already. There was negative value to me on sticking around on the platform, so I left. I am on Mastodon and Bluesky and LinkedIn, but any of those could go bad too. So it’s important to me to have my own space where I can establish my own digital sovereignty, on my own terms, not as a reluctant tenant of somebody else’s platform.
To have that sovereignty, you need your own domain name, so that you can hopscotch between different services while remaining findable, and without losing that historical track record. This blog has been hosted on four different services so far, and I am less than 100% satisfied with the current arrangements, so it may well move again when I get a round tuit.
But the blog remains searchable at that domain name, and the archives go back to the very first post in 2012. If and when I do have to move it elsewhere, I will pick up my archives and take them with me, remap the domain name, and keep right on going.
That all sounds a bit too easy…
Maintaining my independence in this way is easy right now with text; all of the posts on this blog would just about fill three old-style 3.5” floppy disks. The images weigh in at ten times as much, but honestly most of them are decorative, used to break up walls of text, rather than content in their own right. Even then, hosting for a few hundred megabytes is easy to find, and free or very inexpensive.
A video creator worried about the future of their career in light of the challenges to TikTok does not have nearly as many options. Even if the tools to capture and edit the videos could be replicated outside the platform, hosting video is still technically demanding and expensive, so it’s a choice of which corporate walled garden to choose. There is no easy way to host your own equivalent of TikTok, let alone any way to take your followers with you.
That last point is equally important: TikTok is just an extreme example of humans creating content first and foremost for algorithms. If your funny dance or whatever pleases the algorithm, it has the opportunity to go viral, but each new platform seems to water down further any notion of “following” a person (or a band, or a brand) and seeing everything they post.
Ultimately, then, digital sovereignty is definitely something worth striving for, but it’s worth recognising that some will find establishing it easier than others, and having empathy for those who struggle. The prospect of your whole online identity being erased because of some geopolitical spat that even the people involved don’t seem to be quite clear about is no joke.
Unfortunately simple interoperability is not a complete solution here. Meta’s Threads is (somewhat) interoperable with the Fediverse, but the ability to read somebody’s post, given a link to it, does not really answer questions of algorithmic amplification or suppression.1 I tend to consider these aspects of the current wave of social-media platforms as being intrinsically negative, not because of anything to do with the nature of algorithms, but because they are designed to exclude user control. However, that is beside the point to an erstwhile creator faced with the possibility of losing their entire livelihood and having to start from scratch somewhere unfamiliar. Jumping platforms is hard, partly because of the aforementioned difficulty in bringing your audience with you, but also because of the different nature of the algorithms: what performs well on Instagram is different from what works on TikTok.
Complicated Sovereignty
I don’t have a solution here, just the always-unfashionable point that “it’s a bit more complicated than that”, and we shouldn’t (always) go around blaming people for their choices. I am glad to see people and institutions continue to leave X-formerly-known-as-Twitter, but I do understand why others stay.2
Even in the domain of text, if you’re, say, writing a text blog on Wordpress and you don’t like what is going on over there, you can get off of that platform quickly and quite easily, and there are ways of making the whole process pretty seamless. Unless you have a really custom setup, it’s not at all a big job, and you won’t lose any of your reach by doing it.
If you’re on Substack? That might be a lot harder. People subscribe to you through their Substack account, and read through the Substack app and website (let’s not pretend email is still useful for anything in this day and age). The platform is specifically designed to lock you in. It’s not entirely malicious, to be clear: there are benefits, especially for creators just starting out, and you may choose to make that bargain. However, if you do want to migrate elsewhere, it’s not quite as simple as exporting and re-importing your archive, redirecting your domain name, and calling it done.
I loved old Twitter, but I am not ever getting locked in like that again. This is my online home, and while I may hang out on the various platforms, this is where I can always be found.