I had hoped to finally get back to posting new crafts this week. Being super pregnant and having been very sick with a virus-turned-infection for the past couple weeks, I've not spent much time making stuff to share on the blog or posting on social media. Finally, this week I'm feeling better and have a little time before baby #5 arrives to do a few. Yay, right?
So it came as quite a shock to go to do the weekly post for the Craftastic Link Party on Facebook, as I've done for 10 years now, and then get a pop-up message that all of a sudden sewcando.com "violates community standards". Just like that, I can't link to this blog at all. No further explanation, no way to contact Facebook. Blocked.
It must be some kind of error I think, so I clicked on the "if you think this doesn't go against our Community Standards, let us know" and it takes me to this, which is a generic "feedback" form that says they don't actual review your specific account...
what's the point then?
I then discovered that not only can I not post anything from sewcando.com but ANYTHING I've EVER posted from here has been wiped off my blog's Facebook page. All the tutorials, projects, link parties, EVERYTHING.
Any links to sewcando.com I've ever posted on my Etsy shop's Facebook page have also been removed. If you've ever shared anything from Sew Can Do on Facebook, it's probably gone too. To say I'm beyond shocked is an understatement. Sew Can Do has always been a family friendly, non-controversial, non-political personal blog about a mom who crafts. And that's what gets banned these days???
But pages full of racy photos, profanity, R-rated memes and spam businesses are totally fine.
Because that makes sense 🙄
At most, any given week, for the past decade, I'd share the link to Craftastic Link Party post here and if I had a new tutorial on my social media. Which lately has been more like every couple of weeks. That's it from this site, so it's not that Sew Can Do has been spamming either. And they're totally fine with me still posting links to other people's blogs, just not my own. Um what??
And since Facebook owns Instagram, if you click on my bio link there, which is supposed to go here, to sewcando.com, this is what you get:
So they've removed Sew Can Do there too.
I'd already stopped using Pinterest over their censorship policies that deliberately hide pins and permanently ban accounts that don't match their social agenda viewpoint (as explained here). So instead of being a neutral platform and let you decide for yourself, they all decide to act as editors for what they think you should see or share. It's absolute madness.
Back when social media first came on the scene, it was a blogger's best friend. It was a great way to connect with readers & fans, add extra photos, have personal conversations and an added sense of community beyond the blog page.
Then it became a numbers race to prove popularity in the craft blog world. And the platforms all started to cash in by offering paid placement while they began to limit what followers who opted in could see. Pages you subscribed to or liked became harder to find in your feeds. Posts I made on Facebook to the nearly 7,000 people who liked/followed Sew Can Do's page started only being seen by a fraction of them. In the past year on average any given post I did on Facebook was only seen by about 200 people out of nearly 7,000 who had opted in. For a personal blog that's done for fun rather than income, I'm not about to spend $20 a go to push social media posts to a few hundred more people.
I also noticed my personal feed on Facebook has shown less posts from pages I'd liked or those I'd specifically selected to see first. Why offer user preferences if they're just ignored?
Truthfully, with running an online fabric shop, homeschooling 3 big kids + having two little ones in diapers to contend with in a matter of weeks, I'd been wondering if I should even keep this blog going. I barely have time to do projects, photograph them and write them up, purely for fun, so dealing with stupid, ineffective, biased social media makes me want to just walk away entirely.
All this social manipulation has made me decide I just don't care about being on them or want to waste any more time with their unreasonable ways of operating. So I'm stepping away from most social media for this blog and in my personal use.
I'm going to go back to reading other blogs & sites directly, rather than in a social media feed or from links on them. Why give them the traffic + free content and let them market what they want to you to see, only for them to hobble you at every opportunity? I miss the days before social media took over and started shaping what & how we looked at information. For places that supposedly bring social interaction, I feel much less connected than when blog comments were the main way to interact online. Maybe if more people stepped away, these platforms they wouldn't have such a strangle hold on public communication like they do now.
For now, Sew Can Do will still be on Twitter, since I haven't had issues there, but at this rate, I'm tempted to just disappear from them all entirely.
Maybe it means less people will come here, but this blog was started as a journal for my crafts & to share what I learned as I go. Being internet famous, making $ from clicks or angling to get glanced at for mere seconds before being forgotten on a bunch of platforms is not the point for me. And when it stops being fun and starts being only a time suck and hassle, then it's probably a sign to let things go.
