The social media alternative to Twitter and Instagram with a friendly, bot-free, and community-driven community. Donate to our fundraiser to help us grow!
Should have done this from jump, but this is our fundraising tracker thread and today we are 13% funded! That's $2,654 out of $20,000!
Will you help get us to $3000 this week?
Reason
#1
: Twitter can't be duplicated. The feature set might be replicated, but Twitter has nearly two decades of engineering and community built into it. You're not going to find that on any other alternative platform, no matter how cleverly named they are.
"If you do not own a stake in the platform, you can't hold it accountable to you or your community" also applies to Twitter. Have you downloaded your Twitter archives recently?
MTVNews has archived its web site, along with a generation's worth of cultural production. Most people are lamenting this loss by demanding accountability, but my hot take is this: if you do not own a stake in the platform, you can't hold it accountable to you or your community.
We owe it to ourselves to develop digital community institutions that can take care of our work. This is what the web was designed to do: to share knowledge through decentralized publishing.
Come gather and tell stories with me (
@anndaramola
) this summer. Join me as I host
@yungdeadthing
and my sister Mercy Daramola in conversations about stories, storytellers, truth, and shenanigans! Head to to register.
We built PARIWO as a web application first because it allows us to reach a broader audience immediately. Mobile apps are great, but they contribute to a closed-garden approach to information and archives.
The issue of discoverability hits every corner of our lives. The web is supposed to provide us ways to find each other, and these platforms broke that.
Both options take a lot of work and people are still too comfortable with Twitter, even though it's actively destroying the ways we gather and communicate online.
Announcing our first PARIWO giveaway! We're giving away four (4) SIGNED copies of
@yungdeadthing
's latest novel, LITTLE ROT! Enter for a chance to win at
MTVNews has archived its web site, along with a generation's worth of cultural production. Most people are lamenting this loss by demanding accountability, but my hot take is this: if you do not own a stake in the platform, you can't hold it accountable to you or your community.
I knew waayyyy back in my
@afrolicious
days that these platforms were not only temporary, but were also going to be a black hole for the intellectual and creative capital Black people were producing prolifically.
We should be able to speak up, create, make noise, without looking over our digital shoulders. So, we're building a social network designed for creators to take up space without fear.
And now we're 20% funded! If you believe you deserve more from your social networks, support
@pariwomedia
by sharing, donating, or both! 🗣️
#MakeNoise
!
Instead of listening to the the communities that had long been targets of harm on this platform since the first year Twitter existed, way before Leon Musty, people basically stuck their heads in the sand.
@afrolicious
Since the pandemic began and since Musty bought this app, so much creative capital from marginalized people has been lost, and we have seen just how viscerally Black lives do NOT matter to this world.
Reason
#2
: The community just isn't there. When you move into a new neighborhood, you have one of two options: you either learn to engage with the community that's already there or you try to bring as much of your existing community as possible so you don't feel lonely or siloed.
To take responsibility of this platform, you'd have to recognize that Leon Musty just amplified the margins of harm that affect Black women, queer people, disabled people, and all their intersections the most, and then work to make digital life better for them.
The cool thing about PARIWO’s tech stack is that it can be used to build independent websites and social networks, connecting each of them at the level of the stories they contain. We took the concept of webrings (remembering those?!) and ran with it.
I knew waayyyy back in my
@afrolicious
days that these platforms were not only temporary, but were also going to be a black hole for the intellectual and creative capital Black people were producing prolifically.
We decided to do something beyond that on PARIWO. We want to create better ways for people to gather online, one that recognizes the tendencies for digital platforms to do material harm and works and the community level to reduce that harm.
Reason
#3
: You're not willing to take responsibility for what Twitter has become. In the wake of Leon Musty's purchase of this platform, people loudly proclaimed that they would go down with this shit, er ship.
We are building new ways for people to gather online, and PARIWO is our first platform. It looks and functions very much like other social media platforms, but when you join, you have the opportunity to shape the platform. Your input makes the platform.
@afrolicious
Every mechanism that should've kicked in to curb the pandemic failed because people were fine with a mass disabling event that disproportionately impacted BIPOC communities. And a platform that served to carry information that mainstream media did not has become, honestly? Trash.
That's what
@pariwomedia
is building. Supporting us is not just supporting another social network. You are supporting a budding digital institution designed, from the inside out, to honor BIPOC cultural capital.
Do you believe your work deserves the honor and dignity of preservation and curation? Do you believe that we can design, build, and maintain digital community institutions that will take on the risk of caring for our cultural capital?
I've been building a social network since 2017 and ever since then I've been trying to articulate why people should care about yet another social network, especially one that's built by someone like me.
This platform is owned by a morally obtuse white supremacist. We know the other platforms are manipulating algorithms to curb the spread of truth and people's organizing power. What are we going to do about it?
I haven't even mentioned the way artificial intelligence has warped our trust of information. We are heading into some very weird times where the struggle for the consolidation of power depends on digital platforms' ability to weaponize algorithms to make us all comply.
How, then, do we create better ways to gather a group of strangers online? Can it be done? My brother may not think so, but I think that the same human tendencies to gather can be used to move into a different direction.
@afrolicious
But life was happening. I made... weird decisions in friends that God literally had to sever me from by sending me to the east Africas in 2013 and then again in 2014 while the Black Lives Matter movement was transforming the way people engage with each other online.