Personal

Goodbye, TikTok

Scrolling TikTok was generally a source of either interesting things to think about (when I was getting a lot of ADHD content) or things about recent events (i.e. California fires) or momentary pops of joy (silly animal things, people cooking delicious food, that kinda thing) or community (people being radically honest about their struggles). It's been a thing that my spouse and I have shared over the past few years. It's been a vessel of self-discovery.

Now it's going to be invisible. Unavailable. All of those moments will still be there but I won't have access to it because some politicians decided a ban was advantageous and slipped it into a bill that nobody would dare say no to (it was included in the Ukraine/Israel national defense funding package). I consider myself an elder millenial, so I'm familar with the concept of social media platforms going away, either due to loss of inertia or something better coming along. Grieving TikTok feels different because its ending is blatantly malicious.

I feel sad and lonely and bereft of a channel that helped me stay sane and grounded through some incredibly hard times. I can't even bring myself look at it anymore because it's just full of familiar faces saying goodbye.

None of the alternatives are palatable. I'll rot in the ground before I give any Zuckerberg joint a single second of attention, Google platforms aren't much better and Twitter (it's the one thing that's ok to deadname) is completely off the table. Moving to a platform explicitly operated for the people of mainland China, with all that that implies, seems shortsighted. The fediverse options aren't even really to the point of getting off the ground.

On top of all that is the creeping horror I'm feeling about reversion back to those years when things just kept happening, faster every single day, faster than anyone could process. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know where to turn to find out. I feel lost.