Embedded is your essential guide to what’s good on the internet, written by Kate Lindsay and edited by Nick Catucci.
Flooding your zone with shit, brb. —Kate
A few weeks ago,
did a breakdown of how he promotes his Substack. Things aren’t as straightforward as just dropping your post on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook anymore, because those apps have either fallen out of the zeitgeist or actively suppress the work of writers. The app that everyone is on—TikTok—does not really support links. It basically means the best way to promote your work these days is, as Broderick writes, “flooding the zone with shit”:I think a lot of people, myself included, are stuck in the mindset that you have to be online still. That there’s still some kind of social pressure for logging into the Hell Site to be afflicted by discourse, or whatever. But my main takeaway from these early days living out in the wilderness of the new internet is that everything is a big mess right now and you can kind of go and do whatever you want wherever you want. Which is, obviously, a little scary for folks who haven’t used their browser’s URL bar in a while, but four of the biggest platforms are all showing the same recycled video content and the smaller social networks that aren’t are, well, just social networks. Which means platforms don’t really matter anymore.
That’s an intimidating thought as a creator of things on the internet, but a freeing one as a user. Back in 2021, when Facebook and Instagram went down for six hours, I wrote that it allowed me to “briefly imagine that this was the new normal, that the 20-year experiment with social media was wrapping up and the rest of life would be just me, doing what I want in my own small orbit of people and places and things.”
It’s a choice I could theoretically make any day I wanted, but it wasn’t until Broderick’s post that I realized why I haven’t: I need to reintroduce myself to my browser’s URL bar.
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