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Apparently, being forced to use your
“real” name was a bridge too far.
Ello, the obscure social network with little presence in San Francisco (but, as it turns out, a large fan base in the Netherlands) has been growing exponentially, so much so that new users have to contend with long waits as the scrappy platform contends with an unexpected deluge of new accounts.
Granted, the furor unleashed by Facebook’s new anti-pseudonym policy has been worldwide, but S.F. seems to be a hotbed of the reaction. There are probably several reasons for this:
A politically involved drag community, and also the fact that Mark Zuckerberg is our neighbor. (Our bad neighbor, it turns out.) Second, the fracas is arguably yet another permutation of the general anti-tech backlash. In retrospect, when the drag ambassadors got “Sashay away!” as a response to last week’s meeting with Facebook executives in Menlo Park, the #MyNameIs campaign had little other recourse than to go fishing for a new social media site. Facebook is now, in the eyes of much of the Bay Area, officially an authoritarian tyrant.
There is a pull factor as well. Ello’s
manifesto promises never to sell you anything or to sell anyone information about you. In short, “you are not the product.” However, as Jules Suzdaltsev
noted in the Bold Italic, it’s not likely that Ello will be doing to Facebook what Facebook did to Myspace. Ello’s projected revenue stream is built around a “pay-what-you-think-it’s-worth policy” that is refreshingly unlike a multibillion-dollar IPO, but it's unclear if that’s actually viable in a world of such established players.
And if a casual glance at Facebook turns up lots of “Buh-bye, find me on Ello” status updates — along with some envious jostling for invites — a harder squint reveals a burgeoning backlash against its minimalist functionality. Black and white and coveted all over, Ello might be ultra-hip-looking, but it’s not terribly user-friendly yet. (Try searching for someone whose handle you don’t know, or wishing them a happy birthday.) Ello feels like a Dogme 95 film competing against
Avatar.
But could the unthinkable happen? Might Facebook, which at 10 years old is practically a social media stegosaurus, actually topple? Do people genuinely want to ditch it, or are they just acting out of a fit of pique? Are we really clamoring for yet another social media platform? Oakland writer and editor Matt Sussman feels slightly ambiguous. “I joined Ello mainly out of curiosity, and I admire their manifesto. That said, we’ll have to see if they continue to walk the walk, if demand continues like it has been and they’re forced to scale up and expand. I wish I could ditch FB for good, but I’m an admin for my employer’s page, so I don’t see myself going away anytime soon.”
Whether any measurable decline in actual users is a trickle or a hemorrhage, Facebook will probably never publicize the numbers. But the LGBT community’s feelings have come to a head, and Zuckerberg’s baby is unlikely to retain its eternal dominance. Meanwhile, I wrote this, I received an email announcing that “privacy features are coming to Ello very soon.” No matter how much you might wish it well, Ello has a long way to go.
