I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Marti Abernathey last week for her rebooted T-Party Podcast. Marti has been involved in trans activism for a long time, and is even mentioned in Susan Stryker’s Transgender History (I was listening to the audiobook while playing Minecraft, and had to stop digging to celebrate. That’s my Tiktok friend!) Marti is also the only other person I know who actually uses Peertube’s synchronisation feature to mirror and archive their Tiktok posts - something that I think is really important for us all to be doing in order to reduce our dependence on social media corporations, but that is hard to persuade people to do this when running a Peertube costs money.
What has algorithmic social media taken from marginalised communities, and what can we build instead? Artist-researcher Dr Zoyander Street joins Marti for a wide-ranging conversation about owning your content, the myth of the algorithm, AI, and why trans people need to archive our own history.
We talk about why content recommendation algorithms are really built to suppress your posts, why Mastodon works like a school cafeteria, whether there’s a real middle ground on AI, and Desperate Living, Zoyander’s hand-built archive of trans health resources with Studio Voltaire. Marti also looks back on 26 years of trans media, from GayBC and Transsister Radio to The Radical Trannies, and the history that’s quietly disappearing.
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