The Services You Use Matter

Today on Mastodon and Bluesky, I linked to an article from Marisa Kabas, “Substack is at it again,” about newsletter platform Substack’s recent choice to launch a new “enterprise offering” for bigger publications, with Bari Weiss’s Free Press as their inaugural partnership. As Kabas writes,

If you’re not familiar, Weiss gained notoriety as an opinion editor who quit the New York Times in 2020 but acted like she was fired. Since then, she’s built a lucrative career on grievance. To give you a sense of her publication’s schtick, recent post titles include, “Things Worth Remembering: The Empathy of J.K. Rowling” and “Daniel Penny’s Innocence—and the Shame of Alvin Bragg.” […] There are plenty of writers who remain on the platform with actual integrity and journalism chops, so the decision to singularly salute Weiss and co. reads like an intentional statement of values by Substack. Then again, their values were made crystal clear last year.

That last line is a tip toward an article in The Atlantic from December 2023 about how Substack allows Nazis—by which I do not mean merely people on the far right, I mean actual full-stop Nazis—to not only publish on their platform but to make money on it (of which Substack receives a cut, of course).

Now, I’m personally doubtful that boycotts usually have an effect on companies being boycotted. There are exceptions—unfortunately, the most concrete recent example of an effective boycott was the one conservative culture warriors led against Anheuser-Busch for partnering with a trans influencer to promote Bud Light—but that’s more an exception to the rule. Even so, I think where you spend your money—and, in the case of free services that monetize through ads, your time—matters.

For instance, Chick-Fil-A, at a corporate level, championed anti-queer causes; the backlash against them has had at best a modest effect, and their PR responses have been calculated at best. (It’s unclear whether their corporate foundation continued donating to openly anti-LGBTQ groups like the Salvation Army after 2019, but the family that owns them has continued to spend millions campaigning against the Equality Act.) So if not buying your fried chicken sandwiches at Chick-Fil-A doesn’t hurt them, why not do it? So what? Other alternatives might not really be any better, right? You don’t know that your local Popeyes franchise owner isn’t a white supremacist, and you can’t be expected to research every single company you make a purchase from.

Okay. Sure. That’s all true. But when I choose not to buy from Chick-Fil-A, it’s not about their bottom lines—it’s about my ethical lines. I do know that they support groups that actively hurt my community, people I care about, and that they do so knowingly. And that’s a line I haven’t been willing to cross for years now.

This is true for most of our community now with respect to social media: there aren’t that many furries left on X. I used to obstinately keep referring to it as “Twitter,” but it’s no longer the Twitter I had a love-hate relationship with for years. It seemed like it took Musk’s embrace of Trump to finally push most furries off the service, which I frankly find baffling—the writing was on the wall by the end of 2022:

New Twitter will be hostile to anyone queer, or non-white, or slightly to the left of Ronald Reagan. You may be a creator who wants to stay on Twitter to reach your audience, but the audience there will inevitably tilt toward the anti-woke, All Lives Matter, gender critical, Just Asking Questions crowd. If they’re your audience, congratulations, I guess. If they’re not, you have a problem.

But, it was easy to rationalize staying on Twitter, and so a lot of people did. Some people still do. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism something something something delicious sandwiches.

I’m not going to go after anyone for staying on Substack, or even staying on Twitter. Hell, I won’t come at you for eating at Chick-Fil-A. But when you bite into that sandwich or post on that service, you’re saying something about how much you’re willing to inconvenience yourself for your principles. You’re saying something about the lines you’re willing to draw.

Lastly, a note about Bluesky.

A lot of my readers are probably familiar with Bluesky’s recent moderation travails, when, after facing mounting pressure to ban anti-trans “journalist” Jesse Singal, their Trust & Safety team’s response basically punted despite him violating Bluesky’s terms of service—certainly in spirit, and arguably in the letter, too.

I don’t think Bluesky is secretly anti-trans. I think they’re aware of politics. Trump’s incoming FCC chair intends to go after social media companies conservatives believe suppress them. And as much as I genuinely like Bluesky, they’re funded by venture capital (in some cases, by firms that seem questionable even by VC standards), and VCs want a return on their investment.

Bluesky’s older but smaller “competitor,” Mastodon, is a European non-profit that takes no VC money at all, and is meaningfully decentralized—communities can run their own servers with their own rules. If you asked a bunch of queer furry anarchist programmers to design their ideal replacement for Twitter, what they came up with might look an awful lot like Mastodon. But compared to Bluesky, it’s relatively fussy and fiddly. Bluesky, by contrast, feels like old Twitter. It’s more, how might I put it, convenient.

To be clear, I’m on Bluesky! I like it! I’m not planning to leave it! But I’m also not planning to leave Mastodon—and I am planning on continuing to treat Mastodon as my primary social media. While there’s no guarantee that Bluesky will enshittify, it will be under increasing pressure to do so in the coming years, and the Singal episode doesn’t bode well for their ability to withstand it. Right now, Bluesky users are only being asked to ignore the tiniest whiff of shit along with their delicious chicken sandwich. But it’s reasonable to start thinking about what lines you’re willing to draw now.