A Thank You to my Patrons! And a Note about Social Media

Hi folks,

I would like to address you directly today to talk about an important topic that is making me concerned at the moment: ‘Social Media’.

With timrodenbroeker.de I’ve always had the goal of developing a learning platform for digital empowerment. In addition to my courses and tutorials for creative coding, I’ve recently endeavoured to shed light on topics related to philosophy in order to take a more conscious and intelligent look at what some call the ‘infosphere’, of which social media has become a very large part. With my courses, I also want to invite people to become technologically aware and to exchange ideas around these topics. I think that’s super important and Creative Coding can offer us a lot here!

My project, timrodenbroeker.de, works really well within the scope of my possibilities and I am really grateful that I can take on this role. In order to keep control of my system and not fall into the trap of the so-called lock-in effect, I have published as much as possible on my own website. Thanks to my Patreon community, I can still host the site without advertising. I also don’t have to enter into partnerships with any product manufacturers and can publish what I want completely freely. This is very important to me to this day and I won’t change anything. I would therefore like to thank you all for your support! Without my crowdfunding via Patreon, the learning platform timrodenbroeker.de would not exist.

But, and now I come to the point, social media is also important in order to address and inform people precisely where they are. Just having a website is not enough. Many years ago, I decided to focus primarily on Instagram. At the time, it was a reaction to the fact that everyone was moving away from Tumblr. Back then, Instagram was still a platform where people posted private photos with retro photo filters. Using it as a sketchbook for graphic design and creative coding, as I did, was still very unusual around 2017.

In the meantime, Instagram, like X and Facebook, YouTube and many other large networks, has become an engine for disinformation, political division, propaganda, hatred and hate speech. This makes me doubt the situation more and more. I have already shut down YouTube as a channel and only rarely publish videos there. But I have to openly admit to myself that I’m probably still dependent on Instagram as an business owner. I now have over 42,000 followers there and I assume that they are fundamentally important for supporting my project. But today, after Mark Zuckerberg announced that he doesn’t care about Europe or the security of his platforms and that he and his company are 100% supporting Trump, things are getting critical for me. I’m not going to delete the channel, but I’m very reluctant to continue posting there. It just feels wrong.

I need your support to break my dependency on instagram to a certain extent. Here’s how you can help me:

• Subscribe to my newsletter to stay up to date:
  https://timrodenbroeker.us11.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=049711f6295e02c420399ea50&id=c306d4fbe4

• Join Mastodon and let’s build a creative coding community together.
  https://mastodon.social/@timrodenbroeker

• Tell your friends and peers about my offer and make sure that I get reach through recommendations even with fewer posts on social media.

• The income I currently earn via Patreon is enough to keep everything running safely. However, I do want to continue hiring freelancers to help me with video editing and proofreading as well as translations from German (my native language) into English. Only if I can outsource these tasks can I work creatively on new ideas. That’s why financial support is of course particularly important here.

So spread the word! Thanks for everything! I’m looking forward to starting this year with you!

Tim 🙏