What Bear's social media refugees have in common
Article written by cris
You may have guessed that the name "Grizzly Gazette" is a reference to Bear (Grizzly). Our blog is meant to be an online "publication" (Gazette) of sorts, that (among other goals) seeks to bring the community of this platform closer together, by tapping into its collective consciousness to explore the topics that are on its "mind".
One topic that is evergreen on Bear is "social media bad". Blogs on Bear, of which the title of the first post reads something like, "Why I quit social media", are a dime a dozen. A dislike for the online engagement-farming machines that run our modern dystopia seems to be a trait that is common among many of this platform's users.
As soon as we finished setting up this blog, and I began to ask myself what I should write about, this topic immediately came to my mind. It's the obvious choice, and it's a bit ironic too, because one of our first posts will end being written about "social media bad" as well.
Ask DNA
It's funny how the very founder of this platform has his own gripes with social media. Maybe, in an impalpable way, that spirit became infused in the "mechanism" (the code) of Bear Blog, and naturally attracted the kinds of users who are drawn to it. Here's how Herman felt about social media:
It has been a year since I left social media. It was difficult to do at the time, and I kept finding excuses and reasons not to. Looking back I realise it was because I was an addict. I was addicted to the scrolling, the likes, the unlimited content.
I too was an addict.
In late 2023, I had enough of that. I was tired of the pointless arguments that I got into, the negativity that I was constantly exposed to, and of wasting my time doom-scrolling. It had been going on for years, and I was over it. So, I made a resolution for 2024 that I would delete my Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok accounts forever. (I later also deleted my Reddit account.)
It's been almost two years, and while I have at times felt some FOMO (mostly when friends excitedly show me something interesting or fun on there), I have held strong and resisted the temptation to return. I made that mistake countless times before, convincing myself that I could somehow "control" my addiction, but just like an alcoholic who can't keep it at one drink when he enters a bar, so I couldn't keep it at "just a few minutes a day" once I stepped into a social media app on my iPhone.
I don't judge anyone for spending their time on these platforms. I am certain that very many people are making a good use out of them. How could I judge them anyway? I spend as much or more time on the Internet as they do regardless, and not always necessarily doing anything useful either (just having fun). I'm not trying to act like an elitist, neither am I trying to prove to anyone that I have better "self-control" than others (I don't), and neither am I saying that everyone must delete their accounts like I did. I'm just saying that by staying away from social media, I have finally begun living the life that I always wanted to live, focusing on the things that matter to me. The way that I see it, many people are like me and are incapable of moderating how much time they spend on social media. They thereby end up living a life different from the one that they actually want to live.
The pull to over-indulge in spending our time on social media isn't a bug. It's a feature. Herman noticed it too:
I was addicted to social media in the same way I was addicted to cigarettes. I wasn’t a heavy social media user (or smoker for that matter), but I knew that it wasn’t in my best interests. I knew that it was clever capitalism that kept me on my leash, and I knew that it was robbing me of my time and my physical and mental health. But it was there with me every day. It never made me feel any better, yet I still spent time and energy on it.
Emphasis mine.
An online refugee camp
Why is it that we feel so drawn to these vicious, data-hoarding platforms anyway? Our very own Ava once explained it thus:
And due to all time spent on there and almost everyone you meet being in on it too, I get the impression that it becomes this thing you just have to do, like paying taxes. You might not like any of it, but you just have to. Isn't it intense how services that are less than 20 years old have wormed themselves into our brains as so fundamental? They are a blip in human history. They're way younger than the average human's lifespan. And still, people act like they're going to die out here without being on the big socials. How did humanity manage before, then?
It is, indeed, kind of crazy, that this expectation exists that everyone has to have an account on these platforms so that we can all "stay connected" and "be informed about each other". I don't want to digress, but I'll just leave this question up in the air: Why do we, as a society, even assume that everyone being active on social media should be the norm?
I think that this expectation is a symptom. The root cause is the innate human need for connection and community.
So, let's assume, for a moment, that this need is innate indeed. Do social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok fulfill it?
Yohann seems to think that there might have been a time when they did, but they no longer do.
...there are a few independent forums that I still check, which were built around specific interests two decades ago. They lack the same incentive structures that plague larger social media platforms like Facebook. The forums (at least the ones that still exist) are still chugging along okay. But the bigger platforms (specifically those which encouraged you to migrate your "real world" social network online) are not doing well. Maybe there was a time when these platforms enhanced real-world connections, but that time is long past.
He followed that with this remark (which we'll get back to in a moment):
So I logged into Facebook today. It was a mistake. I saw maybe one post from an acquaintance, and a torrent of ads on the page.
So, why don't social media platforms fulfill that need for community anymore? Yohann answered:
...no matter who you are, you can go online and find entire communities dedicated to hating people just like you. And social media algorithms, for whatever reason, love to pipe those opinions into your feed.
If social media ever had any real "social" component to it, if it ever served as a means to grow communities, then that goal seems to have long been given up on, in favor of harvesting the attention of its users to serve them ads, which of course, is achieved by having the algorithms promote the vilest kind of bait content.
Very many of us flee to Bear Blog in search of an online community. Bear Blog seems to provide that somehow, and in some cases, even for the first time. Much like platforms such as neocities.org, Bear Blog is introducing a whole new generation to what the Internet was (and still can provide): a space for likeminded people to find each other.
Ophelia (who, by the way, maintains a beautiful blog) is a good example of that. She had this to say about why Bear Blog made her feel, for the first time in her life, like she is a part of a proper online community:
When I first started on Bear Blog, I just wanted a place to write. I didn't really care about amplifying other blogger's voices on my page, or reaching out to other bloggers via email. I didn't care, I soon learned, because I had never learned about it before! It's not something the Big Web cares about because it's essentially an impossibility given the vastness of it all, and it had passed me by. All I needed then was a website where I could log on, write, publish, and log off. For a while, that was all Bear Blog was to me. But as my posts gained more traction and people started reaching out to me or including me in their blogrolls, I realized how good it felt to be a part of the community, and I want to recreate that feeling for others wherever possible.
Emphasis mine.
What sets Bear Blog apart
There are no shortage of blogging platforms for us to choose from, but in all the years (probably since 2005) that I have maintained blogs, I have never enjoyed publishing on a platform as much as I enjoy doing that on Bear Blog.
There was something highly specific that I wanted to get from blogging: community. It's cheesy, it's a cliché, but that's what I wanted. I wanted to find people who, like me, were looking for a mostly text-based Internet (without having to give up on the HTTP protocol), where we can enter and/or form small groups of likeminded individuals, who could even potentially even become "online friends" I mean, why not? That was my experience with online forums in the early 2000s anyway, and Bear has enabled me to experience some of that again, but through blogging.
After I deleted my social media accounts in late 2023, I immediately went looking for community through blogging elsewhere, and "stumbled" on Substack. I used the quotation marks there because (in my humble opinion) that platform has been astroturfed in the "blogging community" as a whole to oblivion. Saddly, it became everything that (I thought) it had set out not to become: yet another engagement farming machine. You can try to interact with people on there through the "notes" and the "chats", but you won't be able to "build" a community, not like the one we have here at the Gazette anyway.
So, in early 2025, I deleted my Substack (despite actually making over $50 through it at one point). It wasn't about the money for me.
I wish that I had taken note of the day that I found Bear Blog. I think that I was so desperate to find a platform that gave me exactly what I wanted, that I even went on Google to search for one. I vaguely remember punching something like "plain text blogging platform" or whatever into the search field.
Bear Blog was right at the top.
Matt Bee (who has been active on Bear Blog since April 2022), had basically the same requirements as I did:
I was starting to lose hope that I'd find a blog platform that meets all my requirements, but bearblog is almost there.
1. Free, no ads
I hate ads, and I'm not the only one. I think that many users on Bear Blog enjoy the pop-up-free reading and writing. Not even the premium is being pushed onto us. Echoing what Yohann wrote, Ophelia (going back her) wrote the following in that same post:
I've blogged for a long time, but I've never blogged with the sense that I am an active part of a living, breathing community like I have on Bear Blog. On Tumblr, Substack, or any of the other platforms I've tried, the number of users and follower counts and Big Brain Essays (but they're really just ads) all felt too bloated for my presence to make a difference. Forget making a difference, will anyone even see me? How can they, even if they want to, with all of this other crap in their face fogging me from their view?
2. Not self-hosted
Very many of us who deeply wish to blog and connect through it, only have a marginal understanding of the technologies that enable us to do so. A lot of those technologies are under the control of monolithic entities that we don't like and don't want to support. It is technically possible for anyone to learn how to "self-host" a blog on the Internet, but the existance of Bear Blog proves that very many people are looking for a trustworthy platform to just write on, that takes care of the technical nitty-gritty for them. Blogging shouldn't be an activity reserved only to those know how to use a computer without a mouse. One may legitimetly just want to start writing, and not to potentially spend years learning what Herman had to learn to set up a system that works and is secure. For this group of people (which I am a part of), Bear Blog got rid of that worry.
3. Lightweight, stylesheets I don't hate, markdown
It's kind of crazy how Herman hit the sweetspot with how much customization Bear Blog allows for (giving the "tinkerers" among its users something to endlessly tinker with), yet how astonishingly simple it is to just set up a basic blog for writing, and leave it at that. In fact, the writing is at the front of the Bear Blog dashboard experience, and Markdown (which isn't required, but can be learned by anyone in an hour) makes formatting the text such a pleasant experience (for me). Bear Blog is about as inclusive as blogging platforms can be in how it strikes a balance between ease of use and customizability.
4. RSS feed
Part of what makes building a community on the Internet possible, is the ability for us to be able to keep receiving updates about each other's activity. Social media platforms allow you to "follow" others and to be notified of when they publish content, but they are also designed to be yet another tool to farm engagement. Bear Blog has RSS feeds built right in, so that when you find a blog that you want to keep following, you can continue to do so, without the perverse incentive that a public number of subscribers would give the blogger to churn out content just for the sake of growing that number.
How to find your sleuth?
"Sleuth" is (I learned that today) what you call a group of bears.
In his fifth and last point, Matt expressed that wasn't as enthused about the Discovery feed, but I'd argue that it is the "secret sauce" that allows us to grow commuities on Bear Blog. It isn't perfect, and I'm sure that Herman would be the first one to admit that. Sure. However, it's a difficult (maybe even impossible) thing to come up with the perfect equation for a balanced algorithm that puts the human on the appropriate spotlight. That being said, I think that the Discovery feed it works, and Matt kind of admitted it:
When I make a post, and it doesn't immediately get any likes boosts or replies, my brain makes me think everyone hates me. (...) However, sometimes I get a kind email or a direct message out of the blue, and whenever that happens, it feels really special. I never expect it, because someone had to go out of their way to do it. With a social media post, the like button is right there...
Notice the wording there. I'm sure that Matt and I aren't the only ones who want to feel that the thoughts that we share are read. A lot of people write just because and that's fine, but for others, like for us, we write because we want feedback. It makes us feel alive. This is enabled by the Discovery feed, which gives everyone a (relatively) fair chance and receiving that feedback.
So to finish my first post on the Gazette, I want to use this opportunity to encourage everyone who feels as invested as I am in Bear Blog, to do the following three things to help the community to grow:
First, if you regularly look at the "Trending" feed, try also to also check out the "Most recent" feed sometimes. Yes, there is a lot of spam and "My first post" type of stuff in there, but occasionally going there to find the hidden pearls and help raise them above the water (by upvoting them), is the way to go.
Second, leave some kind of contact information on your blog. It can be an e-mail address, a guestbook, or your Discord user name.
Third and last, if you read something you enjoyed (even if you have nothing to add to it), then use that contact information to reach out to the author and let them know.
Bonus: If you love Bear Blog, if you have your own blog on it, and if your interests are somewhere in the intersection between writing, community, and the IndieWeb, then you may just be the perfect fit for our Discord community, which is largely made up of other Bear Blog users, and the Gazette's hub. Reach out to me (my user name is crizz89) to ask for the invite link.