Holidays are a time when we all want to be together. In addition to the loss and pain caused during the COVID-19 pandemic, we also felt disconnected from those we love. Social distancing mandates kept us from spending time together and forced us to use technology like Zoom to share our holiday traditions. This left us all feeling dissatisfied.
This dissatisfaction is evident in the technology world as well. As we have returned to a sense of normal, we have reevaluated how we connect with our loved ones. We aren’t happy with platforms that provide us with fleeting validation from strangers, and welcome those that foster deeper bonds with those we are most connected to emotionally. The evidence of this shift is all around us.
The Collapse of the Metaverse
While it hasn’t quite gone away completely, Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg has decided to pull back on the ambitious metaverse project he embarked on just 18 months ago. During a time when many of us were still in a lockdown or social distancing, the metaverse sounded like a solution.
Creating a world where we could interact virtually seemed like it could help us not feel so isolated from our loved ones. However, once we seemed to be past the pandemic’s worst peaks, the interest in this alternative world all but disappeared. It turns out that what we really wanted was a DEEPER connection with our family and friends, and not simply a different way to foster superficial ones.
Another major problem with the metaverse as built by Meta is privacy. Because the company routinely violates the privacy of users on their other platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, people don’t trust the system Mark Zuckerberg has built. Privacy is a common thread among the new technologies that are winning, such as Mastodon.
The metaverse might be a good way to host work meetings or play video games. It is not the solution we need for connecting with loved ones during the holidays.
What Are Alternatives to Social Media?
There are a plethora of alternative social media platforms out there, but how many of them are truly an alternative to what social media has to offer?
We mentioned Mastodon above. Mastodon is a private version of Twitter, a microblogging social media tool. Many have migrated to Mastodon following the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk. Mastodon is also ad-free, which is an attractive feature to many users. However, there isn’t much of a difference between Mastodon and Twitter. The same functions are available, and it doesn’t do much to help users connect on a deeper level.
BeReal is one of the hottest social media apps on the market. By taking photos with both front and back cameras and timing them so there can be no posing or posturing, the app purports to be a more “real” alternative to Instagram.
However, aside from the photos not beingstaged and filter-free, there isn’t a whole lot else to be seen here. BeReal is an ad-free platform for now, but with no other real way to generate revenue, it will most likely begin selling ads, which will require them to provide user data to advertisers.
Other platforms have already come and gone with their attempts to take down the big platforms. Vero was developed as a way to get back to basics and challenge Facebook. However, the app never truly caught on, and has gone by the wayside in terms of getting users to join and engage with the platform.
The Free Speech Problem
Some new social media platforms were developed due to a perceived lack of free speech. For example, Parler was built as an alternative to Facebook, made for those with a conservative political bent. The notion that Facebook and Twitter were banning users for hate speech and misinformation was not sitting well with some, and they decided to form a new business with this as the driving model.
Former President Donald Trump, himself banned from Twitter, decided to throw his hat in the alternative social media ring and built Truth Social. This was another response to the problem of free speech, specifically on Twitter.
For those that felt that the major problem facing the big social media companies was censorship, the fact that both of these platforms have largely failed seems to disprove this notion.
What Are People Really Looking For in an Alternative Social Media Platform?
The problems of social media platforms persist because the businesses that built them have gotten away from their principles. Facebook and other tools were built to help us connect with one another despite the challenges of time and geography. However, the amount of money it takes to maintain platforms like this is astronomical, and in order to keep them profitable, they had to find a way to earn money.
The way social media earns money is via advertising, and this advertising is made more powerful by using user data. Essentially, Meta, Twitter, and others simply sell your data to companies looking to sell you more products. There were plenty of other ways to make money, but this is what they settled on, and now they can’t break away from it.
Over time, this has led to changes that have created feelings of alienation, insecurity and anxiety. Children and teenagers are more anxious and depressed today as a result of the social world they live in. Not getting enough “likes” on Instagram or views on their TikTok videos can send them into a spiral of feeling worthless.
CircleIt’s generational platform is the only TRUE alternative to social media. While some functions of the social platforms are available on CircleIt, it is not the same as a social media platform. Connecting with loved ones on CircleIt gives you the ability to chat privately, with no ads being shown ever. It also gives you the ability to keep your connections limited to those that you truly love.
Even the live feed function, so popular on social media, is making its CircleIt debut soon. Here, you can post photos and videos for your friends and family to see, without having to worry about irrelevant posts being pulled by a social algorithm. And with the explosive growth CircleIt has seen over the past two years, we know that the true purpose of technology is to keep us connected in meaningful ways.
