Part 2 of 2
Embracing Online Nomadism, and Making it Ours
Okay, so the current ways aren't working for us any longer. What now?
We set ourselves up to be present online more safely. Reclaim our spaces in small but significant ways, while protecting ourselves from policy overreach.
If you'll allow a rabbit in her late 30s to reminisce for a while; back in the day, people made websites. Websites made of pages, rather than databases, which worked more like separate little curiosity shoppes, alcoves and holes in the wall. These were meant for individuals, or smaller groups, to show and share their wares and trinkets - not like the massive town centres we frequent and share nowadays, meant for people to congregate within and yell over one another for attention.
As the latter thrived, grew, and gradually took over, the former became harder to maintain. Now those little establishments have long since been shuttered, and mostly gone forgotten.
While the advent of Web 2.0 did bring improvements for site-making across the board, the massive, centrally maintained content sharing platforms that resulted from it have dominated the web and left little room for much else. I believe that site-making platforms like GeoCities and Angelfire losing popularity has left us far too dependent on more shared, social spaces. These now hold and retain all the power in deciding whether we get to exist on the Internet or, as is often the case, not.
Granted, even if these older platforms had remained as prominent, they most likely would still have similarly restrictive and repressive policies as those that many of us are struggling under today. I'm not naïve, I won't pretend like it would be some kind of utopia online if Twitter or Facebook had never come to power.
However, I think there's a lot to be said about and learned from those older ways. We don't need to do things exactly the same way, but the reliance we've built upon other people allowing us to be present online - in places where everybody else usually is, too - was always going to be risky deal. Now, and for a long while already, many of us are paying dearly for it.
How can that help us today?
As I explained in Part 1, I've had a lot of experience with this sort of thing. If I may be self-serving for a moment here, I've spent a lot of my time and effort over the years yelling about these problems, effectively from the sidelines. It's never felt to me like I reached enough ears to make a difference, so I want to compile my idea of how we should move forward from here. Putting it all into one place will hopefully make it more easily be found and shared around.
I will warn that parts of this plan can and will sound daunting, and that's okay; much like moving out from your parents' house, you must learn skills you need to be more independent online. You also don't need to do everything to the letter; this is just my advice; take and leave whichever parts you feel will work for you.
To sum up my principles of existing online, they go something like this. I'll elaborate more on each of them further below.
1st: "Know Your Standing"
Learn about the sites you're on, their policies and attitudes towards who you are, and the things you're about.
2nd: "Hedge Your Bets"
Spread yourself across the Internet as much as you can comfortably manage, to minimize the harm of losing any one platform.
3rd: "Have a Hub of Things"
Centralize your presence online by making a page linking to your other places on the Internet. Link that page everywhere.
4th: "Own Your Own Thing"
Set up your own place, separate to other centrally managed ones, where people can find you and what you want to share.
New 5th: "Connect Yours with Others'"
Build a network of places by exchanging mutual links to each other, so folks can navigate our distributed communities.
First Principle: "Know Your Standing"
This is, as far as I'm concerned, the bare minimum requirement for being online, and might come across as a tad redundant. If what you're about doesn't sit right with the "normies" in some way, you need to keep tabs on if and how you can work with or around the rules of a platform you want to use.
While I'd prefer not to use "othering" as the basis of any rules or principles, there's no denying that society at large threw the first stone long ago. I actually won't belabor the point but if you're reading this, you're likely an outsider, and there's always going to be someone with you on every space online who would prefer that you weren't there.
Doing your research into the sites you use, their reputation with moderating content, their content policies, the vibe towards what you want to do there, is all essential. Don't leave it up to luck, unless you know what you're risking. Your time and energy are precious, and focusing it on the places you can thrive within will pay dividends in the long run.
It's important to note that this is an ongoing task since, as we know very well by now, this can change overnight. Keep yourself informed and up to date on goings on as best you can. Social media can help with this, but if that's not your jam, checking in on your peers from time to time through journal posts and the like is invaluable too.
Second Principle: "Hedge Your Bets"
Nowadays, you owe it to yourself to maintain some level of redundancy online if you keep a presence online, especially if you're a creative type sharing your things here. The best time to get yourself set up on more than one place was yesterday. The second best time is now.
There's no sugarcoating it; you can't afford to put all your stock into and rely on any one place. You put yourself entirely at the mercy of those running it, which can ruin you sometime down the line. The day that your work might get policed, or worse, banned entirely off of the one site you're on, it will be too late to do anything about it.
As an artist, with a tool like PostyBirb being actively and regularly maintained, there is little to stop you from crossposting to various sites any longer. You don't have to be as crazy about it by posting to 8 or more places at once, but a couple of backups in places which will let you post there can, and will prove invaluable.
As a sideline to this, but still worth mentioning; please, please set up some form of offsite backups for original copies of your work. Under NO circumstances should you rely on someone else's website to safely store your only copy of anything you have ever created, because they can and most likely will delete it if they see fit.
Third Principle: "Have a Hub of Things"
Putting things in their appropriate places is a good start, but being in multiple places at once can get a little confusing or difficult for folks to keep track of. You should ideally have a single place you can point people to, so they can pick whatever it is that fits what they're seeking from you; following you on your socials, finding where to commission you, or simply to be on a platform you both use.
There are many ways to go about this, but with Linktree and Carrd now being a thing, it's easier than ever. If you're doing your thing in more than one place for whatever reason, there's no reason not to have one set up.
Then, link it fucking everywhere - I mean it! I've seen so many folks who have a redirect page set up and then don't have it front and center of their every profile. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by making your hub your homepage, so just. Do it.
Fourth Principle: "Own Your Own Thing"
This is where the big guns come in - making your own space. A website.
Unfortunately, this part proved the hardest for me to write, simply because it is such a daunting thing to ask of folks and there being so many variables to it.
Already having my own website and a background in computer science to help with its maintenance means that I'm rather biased on this subject, but I can still fully appreciate that it can seem like an impossible prospect for most folks. Even I feel a little out of my depth managing my site sometimes, but that's because of the way I chose to set it up.
There are far easier and accessible ways to do this, and a little bit of help is never too far away when you really need it. Tutorials for just about anything exist online, and setting up something basic like a Wordpress site is more accessible than ever. There are also plenty of technically minded folks out there who could lend a hand if you reach out to them; while I often have my hands full with all of my things, I've always done what I can to offer advice and help when I'm asked for it.
Since explaining the technical parts of this is far too broad and beyond the scope of this post, I'll instead emphasize the fact that - assuming your hosting provider allows the things you're wanting to share on it - once you're set up and ready to go, you are now your own moderator. I cannot overstate how good this sense of freedom really is.
It does come at the cost of the feeling of connectedness that a centralized platform provides, but having somewhere that you can always go back to - barring any major complications - no matter what policy changes those shared sites decide to enact, is invaluable in this day and age.
Which also brings me neatly to my final point, and a brand new principle.
New Fifth Principle: "Connect Yours with Others'"
One of the things people did when they still made and maintained their own sites was join them together in what were known as Webrings. These were made up of interconnected sites that shared a common theme, so that those interested in one site could more easily find more like them too. They were also apparently connected in a circular fashion, but I feel like this part of the structure isn't an essential feature for our present needs.
This is the "Big Idea" some of you may have seen me teasing in places. I feel like it is the next logical step for bolstering our hopefully increasingly and deliberately nomadic, disparate presences online. We are stronger as a community, and since finding any one place to be together in will continue to be a problem, then we should choose to be nowhere other than everywhere - and make it work for us.
What I propose is that folks with their own niche online, from a little links page to a fully-fledged crowdfunding site, should connect with one another in more meaningful ways.
Exchange links with your friends and peers, set up a section or page on your redirector or website to keep them in, and bolster each other’s disparate presence online. It's a small thing, but I believe it's a great way for us to start reclaiming our agency on the Internet again, together.
I've always tried my best to lead by example and, to this end, my friend Gemma and I have already done this with our two websites! We both have a page dedicated to our online friends now, where our visitors can go to find more of what they seek out from us, or things we might like. My crosslinks page is here, while hers is here, though you'll need to register an account to see it.
If you have a landing page or fully-blown website and would like to connect with me, please let me know! You can reach me through any of my socials via https://the.choco.one/#follow or via email if you prefer, at chocosune.artwork [] gmail. I can't promise that I'll accept every request, but please don't let that stop you either way. Encourage your friends to do the same, and connect with one another too.
So, there you have it. I was admittedly very hesitant to post this second part because it seemed like it may come across as entirely obvious or far too broad-strokes to be of any real use to anybody. However, after the wonderful feedback I got from posting the first one, I realized that a lot of what I now take for granted needs to be said out loud and shared around in order to encourage more folks to get on board.
I genuinely believe that this trend of spaces tightening and growing ever more restrictive to folks like us will only continue, and we aren't likely to find the "perfect website" for us to all agree to move to any time soon.
So, why not make our own, on our own terms?
Thank you once again for reading and I genuinely hope this helps, even if in some small way. If you think you know someone who might benefit from this, please consider sharing it with them.
I hope to see you all on the flip side.