Quick news: STRETCH now has a home on Bluesky and on Mastodon.
- Bluesky: @stretchvancouver.bsky.social
- Mastodon: @stretch@cosocial.ca
Why bother, when you can already find us on Instagram? Here is the twenty-second version.
Every platform follows the same arc. First it is good to you, because it needs you. Then it starts squeezing you to be good to its advertisers. Then it squeezes the advertisers too, and keeps the difference. There is a word for that now: enshittification. You have watched it happen to your own feed. More ads, fewer friends, a timeline that shows you what it wants instead of what you asked for.
And you stay anyway. Not because you love the platform. Because the people you love are on it. The platform knows that. It is holding your friends hostage, and the ransom is your attention.
Bluesky and Mastodon are built so that trick does not work. Nobody owns the whole network. If the server you are on turns bad, you take your name, your followers and your posts and go somewhere better, and you lose nothing. A service that knows you can leave has to earn you every day. That is the whole idea, and it is enough.
For a small studio on East Pender it means something plain. When we post, the people who chose to follow us see it, in the order we posted it, with nobody in between and no bill for reaching our own community.
If Instagram is where you live, please stay. We are not going anywhere, and the schedule, the stories and the odd campfire video will keep showing up there. This is an extra door, not a locked one.
Say hi when you land. Whichever feed you read this on, the invitation is the same one it has always been. 180 E. Pender. See you on the mat.