Why I Love #FensterFreitag
Right now, the online world of social media is pretty fraught. There’s a lot of big and small problems with being online these days.
One bright spot: the wonderful #FensterFreitag.
I joined mastodon.social in 2017, mainly because I heard that Mastodon was one of the up and coming social platforms. Like Twitter at the time, and I suppose other platforms, Mastodon supported hashtags. One hashtag that I noticed almost right away was #FensterFreitag. I had no idea what this meant. Clicking on this hashtag to see posts that were tagged this way didn’t help much. Most posts (sometimes called toots) with the #FensterFreitag tag had images, and some posts had messages written not in English.
Eventually, after reading a bunch of posts and using a few translation apps, I figured out that Fenster Freitag translates to “Window Friday” in German. The photos I saw were pictures people took of windows, from inside their window, or something related to windows. Basically, #FensterFreitag was a weekly hashtag to post about windows. This turned out to be the case since Mastodon was originally founded in Germany with a large contingent of German users. As someone based in Canada, I actually had no idea about any of this.
Which brings me to my central thesis of why I love #FensterFreitag: it brings out some of the best aspects of social media, namely
- Experiencing something unexpected, in a good way,
- Gaining exposure to new communities and ideas, and
- Seeing humans act like human beings.
Through a random hashtag, I learned a bit of German and found a novel community online. I even post sometimes on #FensterFreitag and enjoy similar tags such as #MeerMittwoch (which I believe a pun in German on Wednesday called “Sea Wednesday”).
Social media can be fun!
