Picture your local grocery store.
You know the one where the cashier asks how your day is going — or at least gives you a friendly smile every time you’re in. Where the path through the aisles is ingrained in your brain, so much so that you could probably navigate blindfolded from the produce to the dry goods and the freezer section. It’s not perfect, but it’s been a key cornerstone in your life for years, and somewhere you visit more often than almost anywhere else save your home.
And now imagine it gets bought by the most awful new owners.
Sure, they probably aren’t going to change everything right away. Maybe take down the Pride flag in the window, fire that friendly cashier, or change the store’s name to something stupid.
Maybe you don’t even really notice things are that different at first. And after all, it’s the grocery store. You still have to keep going for eggs and milk or whatever.
But then you wake up one day to go to the grocery store and realize that everything is in a different spot and none of your neighbours go there anymore.
The whole store is just full of crypto bros spouting fascist rhetoric and plastering AI slop everywhere, and as soon as you open your mouth to ask where the cheese is, someone calls you a horrible slur.
And now you don’t know where you’re going to buy groceries anymore, because it turns out every grocery store is like that now.
Welcome to social media in 2025.
Sure, Twitter — or, er, X — was never a bastion of wholesome community gathering, but it served a utilitarian function of interconnectivity.
The same goes for Facebook and Instagram, the former of which may be an even more apt example of this grocery store comparison thanks to entire communities’ reliance on Facebook Marketplace and groups to function.
These platforms have become key cornerstones of society over the past two decades, with more than three billion active Facebook users in 2024.
They’ve been where we keep up with loved ones and connected with people around the world. In these spaces we’ve sold our busted side tables and shared pet pictures and found community through Jell-O.

And for many of those in the media business like myself, these spaces are where we’ve built careers off of sharing pithy thoughts and keeping people informed on what’s happening in the world.
But now America and the world is in the midst of a Trump 2.0-sized reckoning, and the social media infrastructure upon which we’ve built our society suddenly feels a lot less stable.
Ashes to ashes, slop to slop
The second presidency of Donald Trump is not the sole cause of this decline, but rather a deeply rotten symptom of a years-long decay.
Maybe the social media crash started with tech billionaire Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in 2022. Maybe it started with the proliferation of cryptocurrency into Silicon Valley, or the new obsession with AI.
Or maybe it actually started two decades earlier, with Mark Zuckerberg’s 2003 Facebook prototype originally designed to rate his classmates’ attractiveness — perhaps our platforms are just finally returning to the slop from which they came.
Maybe it’s impossible to precisely pinpoint the beginning of the end. But the prominent presence of Zuckerberg and Musk (alongside fellow tech moguls Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook and others) at U.S. president Donald Trump’s inauguration last week signals a new era of uncertainty for the incredibly online.
And for many folks who’ve reluctantly put up with the degradation and crypto-bro-ification of these platforms in recent years, it was the final straw.
Users are fleeing, or at least re-evaluating their relationships to, these platforms at rapid rates.
The day after the U.S. presidential election saw the largest exodus of users from Twitter since Musk bought it.
It’s like that Community meme — we can forgive the tech oligarchs for taking our data and selling it to nefarious companies (or arguing that “cis” is a slur), but we draw the line at neo-fascism.
Which is fair! Despite the many powerful people in America who seemingly believe the opposite right now, we should be drawing the line at fascism!
A winged migration
It seems like everyone, from celebs to the District of North Vancouver, is leaving X in response to Musk, well, being himself.
I started to scale down my Twitter involvement last fall ahead of the U.S. election, after spending more than half of my life on the platform and building my career there.
I’ll admit it feels cowardly to have waited that long to leave, particularly in consideration of Musk’s deeply anti-LGBTQ2S+ policies and ongoing flirtation with various far-right ideas and figures over the past few years.
Stronger souls than I set hard boundaries earlier. But I stayed because I needed something that could at least partially fill the void that I knew the platform would leave.
After all, Twitter had been a place where I made connections that led to my career, and friends who I went on to know in person. I work at Xtra only because my former manager reached out by using Twitter’s direct messaging service.
And my daily scroll of the platform is how I’ve kept abreast of breaking news events, or just the discourse of the day. But as time went on, being on the platform felt like engaging in a habit that I knew wasn’t good for me, yet I was doing it anyway, like smoking.
I decided that if I was going to quit cigarettes, I needed nicotine gum.
Enter Bluesky — the open-source, bare-bones alternative to Twitter that I initially joined when the platform launched through invite-only memberships in 2023.
The surge in new users in fall 2024 proved to be the push I needed to untangle myself from Musk’s platform.
And it’s proven to be a pretty good facsimile of “old Twitter,” full of the sort of inter-community discourse I love, hot takes, good posts. There are even some familiar faces who became household names on Twitter, like the “menswear guy” and dril.
I’ve built a reasonable following on Bluesky, and found many of my mutuals from the old place.
But is Bluesky enough to fill the Twitter-shaped void in progressive society?
And what of Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp?

Why is it harder to break up with Zuck?
The exodus from Meta platforms has been, in the public conversation at least, much more complex than what has happened to Twitter.
For one, the same old villain who’s always been there is still the man in charge — the mask is just off as to his political priorities now.
But Meta’s recent change to its hate speech policies to allow for anti-LGBTQ2S+ harassment, alongside Zuckerberg’s very public capitulation to Trump, has many people reconsidering the role of that platform in their lives going into 2025.
Further complicating things is just how ingrained Meta platforms are in peoples’ day-to-day lives.
I recognize that my Twitter addiction is a result of my profession — most normal people don’t care that much about the networking provided by such a place.
Feeling like your entire sense of self and career is tied to an online micro-blogging website is a distinctly “digital journalism” problem, not a normal person problem.
Meta’s platforms, on the other hand, are a different beast.
Entire communities are reliant on Facebook’s “groups.” Facebook is the organizing hub for everything from inter-apartment communications — my building’s Facebook group is a vital resource for passive-aggressive posting about people hogging the laundry machines — to tracking down a bag of lost pork chops.
Facebook Marketplace has become a source of legitimate income for everyone from career yard-salers — my future mother-in-law is the grand maestro of one of Nanaimo’s most bustling online bazaars — to those of us who find some old Pokemon cards in a closet.
The same goes for Instagram, where everyone from providers of parenting advice to models to tattoo artists have built entire careers. Numerous shops and restaurants rely on the platform to generate business.
You can’t just build all of that again from the ground up.
You can try to make something new — and as we’ve seen from Bluesky, that can work to a point — but the key benefit of these social platforms, the thing that makes them tick, is that everyone is there.
They work because the news of the moment, the coolest people, and the conversations people want to be a part of are happening there.
We can’t simply “make a new Facebook” or “make a new Instagram” and expect three billion — or even three million — people to just hop on board.
And nothing makes you want to leave a party quite like showing up and being the only one there.
Using our social muscles again, and for the first time
And yet staying on these platforms means taking psychic damage every day, continuing to give our data to terrible people, and likely enduring some flavour or form of harassment, misinformation, hate speech or a toxic combination of all of the above.
So what’s the answer? There is an obvious one that is easier said than done: log off.
Society functioned plenty well before the advent of these platforms, and it can again.
Since leaving Twitter, I’ve gotten really into building Gundam models. I’ve travelled for competitive Magic: The Gathering tournaments. I’m trying to be better about phoning my friends who live far away.
Find your version of that — maybe it’s a class at your local community centre, or a weekly movie night with friends. Maybe it’s taking your kids to a local play group, or simply going for a walk with your neighbour.
Put up a bulletin board in your apartment lobby, or host an actual garage sale instead of just dumping everything on Facebook Marketplace.
Remember that social media is not the only space to be social.
And for those connections that have to be digital, find the new frontiers that align with your values. Maybe that’s Bluesky, maybe that’s something else that works for your community.
I often say that the various Discord servers I’m in — one with about two dozen of my close personal friends, another with hundreds of gender-diverse Magic players from around the world — are the only online spaces that still feel good to me.
You don’t have to keep shopping at the grocery store run by fascists if it’s not somewhere that carries the food you need or makes you feel good. Go to the farmer’s market around the corner. Grow your own tomatoes on your apartment balcony. Trade for a cup of flour with your neighbour.
Remember that just as No Frills isn’t the only place to get your groceries, social media is not the only space to be social.
Read more: Media, Science + Tech
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