A word from our Director, Matt Williams:
Eight years ago, we introduced our Hemlock Community Values as a way to help campers better understand what it means to be a part of a healthy community. While learning, interdependence, compassion, wholesafety, faithfulness, and gratitude have aspirational qualities the reality is that these values are deeply entrenched within the very DNA of Sky Lake itself.
At its best, social media has provided all of us with a platform in which we can live out these Hemlock Community Values beyond the gates of Sky Lake—those weekly campfire livestreams during the height of Covid were a lifeline for so many of us.
How we as a community can determine whether something is truly a core value is whether it can be used to help make a decision in a challenging situation. We were deeply troubled by the recent announcement that Meta products would be phasing out third-party fact checking and removing protections for vulnerable populations (which includes many beloved members of our community.) Simply put, we were troubled because this decision by Meta creates an environment directly opposed to almost all of our Hemlock Community Values.
While we fully appreciate that we pay nothing for the Meta products we use and that we are not even close to being a major stakeholder for them, we feel that we must take some semblance of a stand to remain faithful to our Hemlock Community Values. From Sunday, January 19 through Sunday, January 26, Sky Lake will be fasting from all Meta products—most notably our Facebook and Instagram accounts.
Fasting has long been used within the Christian tradition to help practitioners discern faithful steps forward. We won’t be fasting from all social media during this time, just the opposite. We will be exploring at least two newer platforms: Bluesky and Pixelfed. Both of these platforms are committed to remaining open source and to refrain from selling user data to any third party. The content we post will be visible to you without forcing you to create an account (although both of these platforms make it quite easy to create a free account.)
We hope to use this time of fasting Meta products to contemplate how we might increase and diversify Sky Lake’s digital presence in the world. If you feel so moved, we invite you to join us in this time of fasting. Either way, we hope to remain connected with you across the ethers.
Pax vobiscum,
Matt