The final MendMarch :(

So this is sad. MendMarch is something I've been running on Instagram for the past 7 years (plus two times MendMay), but it's going into forced retirement because of idiotic digital overlords killing their own baby with greed.

It's been a total blast, a mend party, a hilarious sharing of themed fixes and a mass mend gathering via hashtag. New menders are minted, mendfriends are made, thousands of garments are saved (about 17,000) . Above are the prompts for this year, 2024; below is last year's. Here's a post I did about the first one.

But dumb Meta has decided to asphyxiate itself via the picking-teams-in-middle-school model. Only famous or fancy or, mostly, paying accounts can be seen. The hashtags under which we gather now only show the "top" 28 (?!?) posts. This year's MendMarch is set to be the biggest, as more and more people mend, meaning that thousands (last year about 8,000) of posts will be hidden, unfindable, ignored.

Those hegemonic, self immolating morons! A lot of people are mad at them: vintage sellers, for one group, are completely unable to continue their activities, and are just leaving. Any fun left in the app is being leached away. This last time I'm trying to salvage MendMarch, with microtagging--making a new hashtag every day, and asking mendmarchers to tag my account @visiblemend so all the posts are findable on my profile page--and whatever else we can devise. But it's not ideal is it? Such a shame, because the mending corner of IG has always been a delightful, ego-free, friendly refuge.

Well, that's all for now. I'm going to try to post more here, pending a redo of this whole site, and figuring out some other format for virtual meeting--though I did build this WORLD MAP OF MENDING! (I just don't have the bandwidth to tend it properly.) Meanwhile, real world mending is thriving, proliferating--and word on the street is: we want more of that.

What do you think? Comments are open!

Below: MendMarch2023

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