Will Hopkins

Links and essays


How to know when to leave

Since November, I've been preoccupied by a question: how do I know when it's time to leave?

On the one hand, I want to stay and fight. When a place is getting bad, if the good people all pack up and leave, then they give up the ability to make it better.

On the other hand, if the rules are stacked against you or it's a dictatorship, then what levers do you really have to pull? Does your personal suffering really buy you much?

The origin of the question is American electoral politics, but right now I'm thinking about Instagram. Meta has made some staggering (but hardly surprising) policy changes to cater to the new administration and bolster their bottom line. Specifically, they have rolled back protections for minoritized groups, will no longer perform fact checking, and are moving their moderation team to Texas. You can now accuse someone of being mentally ill just because they're gay on Threads, Instagram, and Facebook, if you're a terrible person. And let me be clear: Mark Zuckerberg is just such a terrible person. These policy changes are intended to harm 2SLGBTQIA+ people, women, and minoritized racial groups.

With all these changes, it makes it easier to answer the question. I don't want to give my time and attention (and their concomitant value) to a platform full-throatedly enabling fascism.

I've been using Instagram since about 2013, when they first launched the iOS app, and it was crucial in my becoming a photographer. I've made many, many friends there, and it's hard to contemplate leaving.

But that's the nature of the walled garden, isn't it? They let us build and cultivate our networks, and then hold them hostage while they extort as much wealth as they can. We have no power on someone else's platform other than to leave, so they make that as painful for us as possible.

I'm already active on a Mastodon instance run locally, and will be setting up a Pixelfed account on an instance soon. I run this website. There are alternatives. It isn't easy, but leaving while maintaining some connections is possible. And I think it's time.