Social media really doesn’t work huh? Through the extreme ease of sharing yourself, people start to view themselves a lot more on how they are perceived rather than how/who they are. Folks use their preferred app to present their most ideal self, not their most true self. Due to everyone presenting their idealized selves, there exists an echo chamber of people feeling bad because everyone around them is so happy, then they post about how happy they are to “keep up” with those around them, only spreading the feeling further. Also these apps record everything you do on them, and through algorithms that are improved daily, they can tell exactly what keeps your eyeballs glued to the screen for the longest amount of time. With this information they can have a serious grasp on you, making you lose free time to an endless influx of cat videos and whatever.

What I’m trying to say is that I’ve rewatched INSIDE recently and I’d rather sit at a diner eating disco fries with a friend once a year than see the memes they post on their story every week. Love when people send me memes but I don’t care…

With my take on “social media bad” out of the way, what makes a “good” social media anyhow?

The removal of any algorithm that tries to keep you on the app as long as possible is a good start. There should also be actual information that you can gleam and learn from using the app. It should also push for actions outside of self advertisement, some kind of shared appreciation for something bigger than everyone.

Like Pokemon Go, but instead of trying to keep you playing it with a small dribble of rewards like you’re some kind of hamster sucking water out of those tube things it should allow you to organically develop interest in using the app.

What if there was a social media app for sharing observations of the natural world. Where you can finally use all the pictures of goofy animals you’ve seen and you can take photos of interesting plant life you see while out and about, upload it, and through image recognition software you can find out what those plants are, and foster a greater appreciation for the world as a whole!

That’s a thing! it’s called Inaturalist.

Inaturalist, or Inat, is everything you could need when trying to understand the natural world around you. It’s main function is to assist you in identifying the species of something you’ve taken a photo of through image recognition software, then allowing you to upload that, referred to as an “observation” to a database filled with millions of other observations. Your uploads can actually be used by actual botanists and Zoologists in the curation of datasets and projects.

Through the consistent cataloguing of the plants and animals that you see in your everyday life, you can learn the names and traits of the natural world around you. And it’s not even just for people that have the time to go for hikes, the weeds on your curb have names and relatives that give you a greater understanding of the connections that are all around you in nature.

The image recognition is really accurate, so no matter what you’re looking at, if you get a few pictures of it you can go through the options it shows and be like “mmm, yeah it’s that one”.

If you’re not interested in squatting on a curb in the middle of a street to take a picture of a plant, you can also look through every observation that was recently uploaded to the app. There are 6 and a half million people currently using the app all over the world and it shows, you can see moths from Canada and large orchids from China and know that those pictures were uploaded like 5 minutes ago. There’s also the ability to narrow searches down to where you are so you can learn about your surroundings without even leaving the house.

You can join various projects both local and worldwide that let you connect and collaborate with other users in shared goals such as cataloguing the flora and fauna of nearby parks, or other interesting topics. Some of my favorite projects I’ve seen are “Organisms of Minecraft” and “Interactions with Styrofoam” which is just a bunch of various plants and animals growing out of and living on Styrofoam.

I’ve gone for short walks during my lunch breaks and found absolutely gorgeous specimens all around. On one walk I found a thistle growing on the curb outside my work, I unironically thought it was a fictional plant from skyrim. Through using this app I have noticed more about the world around me and have been able to enjoy and appreciate it. I’ve parked my car in a neighborhood on the side of a highway so I can go out and snap a picture of a flower I thought was pretty while driving.

Inaturalist isn’t about you, its about the world that surrounds you and capturing the moments in your life in which a piece of nature caught your eye, and I think that’s profound and much better than whatever the hell is going on with social media nowadays.

If you’re interested in learning more about botany I recommend the Crime Pays but Botany Doesn’t podcast and YouTube channel, that guy really knows his stuff and breaks it down in a way that isn’t dumbed so much that it doesn’t respect the viewer. If you’re looking for a ground up understanding of botany then I recommend A Gardener’s Guide to Botany by Scott Zona.

I don’t know too much about zoology but if you’re interested in learning about why capitalism and social media sucks I recommend CJ the X’s breakdown of INSIDE by Bo Burnham (after watching it though).