Put your ear close enough to the tech industry street and it’s not hard to notice X, the social network formerly known as Twitter, resembling something like the Springfield Tire Fire. Owner Elon Musk has certainly made his mark on the company since acquiring it in late October of last year. The tumult of Musk’s tenure has led many to seek greener, less user-hostile pastures in decentralized services like Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as the upstart Threads from the Instagram team.
Part of the problem in signing up for different social networks, however, is managing them. Indeed, from a disability perspective, there can be immense cognitive load associated with hopping from app to app to app, not to mention incessantly asking the question of what content should be posted where. This isn’t a trivial consideration for anyone, but especially for someone who’s disabled. Not only has Twitter historically been a source of accessibility and community, its degradation as a one-stop shop for news and socialization means someone with certain cognitive and/or motor conditions have to work harder in trying to recapture the best parts of Twitter elsewhere. These aren’t at all trivial concerns.
For Sydney Campos, she hopes Ascend can help fill that void.
The social network, which has apps on iOS and Android, describes itself on its website as “a new social media community-platform designed to improve our lives, based on sharing genuine value and inspiring personal growth.” Perhaps somewhat presciently given Twitter’s troubles in recent times, Ascend further explained its founders “heard the urgent call to develop a new connective platform that positively supports humanity’s evolution and spent the last two years developing the vision into an intuitive, multi-faceted mobile app.” Essentially, Ascend is yet another lifeboat rescuing weary survivors of Twitter’s ever-sinking ship.
Ascend, which launched in February 2022, has a video on YouTube.
In an interview with me conducted earlier this year, Campos, a self-described empath who grew up in San Francisco’s Lower Haight neighborhood and now lives in Southern California, said she’s always considered herself a power user of social media. Campos, who co-founded Ascend and serves as its chief strategy officer, has long been fascinated by social media’s ability to connect people in myriad ways, telling me she met her business partner through a message sent on Instagram and got a book deal through Facebook. She became disenchanted, however, with all the “interference and manipulation and censorship and like” of the biggest networks. Armed with dissatisfaction and the motivation to build better, she sought to create something that eschews all that and has a decidedly better-calibrated moral compass.
“I created it for myself, first and foremost,” Campos said of the impetus for starting Ascend. “I wanted a new place to play where I can just have everything I want to share in one place [instead of] managing 10 different platforms with censorship and spam and all these things. I wanted a place where there’s a new value system [and] a new standard of how we can play in a more elevated way where people are actually held to be responsible for what they’re creating in a different way.”
Campos wants Ascend to be a place for true community amongst users. She lamented many of social media’s longstanding problems in buying followers, the rise in bot accounts, and other nefarious things people do to try and game the system and ratchet up abuse and harassment. She’s frustrated with all the “fluff” on places like Twitter today, as well as the obsessive need for some to use use social networking as a means of always keep up with what’s trendy. Ascend is a refutation of all that.
“I hope with Ascend, we created an environment where people are challenged and inspired and invited to be specific as to like, ‘What do you actually want to talk about? ‘What do you actually want to share that’s going to be most useful?’ Campos said. “I want people to feel that people are going to receive the most value from your
and incentivize for being authentic. I don’t see anywhere else that does that.”
Cursory glances at the pages for Ascend on the App Store and the Google Play indicate the service isn’t setting the world on fire—14 reviews on the former, 11 on the latter—but rates highly with a 4-star rating. According to Campos, feedback about Ascend has been positive. She said people have told her they “feel different when they open the app” but caveated they also recognize the learning curve. Upon signing up, Ascend asks users to complete a personality questionnaire; in addition, Campos said Ascend was “intentionally designed” to curb anxiety over notifications.
“We felt that, right at the beginning, we wanted to just do the right thing,” Campos said of Ascend’s design philosophy. “So much of our design is we just wanted to do the right thing and create a place that feels good [and] that’s going to be nourishing and supportive for someone to have almost a relaxing experience where they can learn and read and take in content that they’re gravitating to. There’s no agenda of sucking people’s energy or draining them or addicting them. And there’s this other element of it’s different that we have people reading other people’s content, that we’re inviting people to be a creator.”
People say Ascend is “unlike anything else they’ve seen,” Campos said.
The jury’s still out as to whether Ascend reaches critical mass. Nonetheless, Campos and team’s goals and vision for their platform are laudable. Given Ascend’s steadfast focus on building community, it’s certainly possible to imagine the service could be a place where the disability community congregates in the future. This is the ripple effect of X (née Twitter) becoming what it is; X isn’t going anywhere in the foreseeable future, but the damage sure seems to be irreparable. This is why Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads, and yes, Ascend, all share common ground: they’re all trying to make social media better in their own images. Just as time and technological progress are immutable forces, it’s likely X will be to this generation what MySpace was to the prior’s: a vestige of the past. The sobering truth is, Musk’s stewardship sure seems to only hasten the company’s journey on the road to irrelevancy.
“I see Ascend being the new social media platform of the planet, where everybody is gravitating to and where everyone wants to connect, everyone wants to create on,” Campos told me of her hopes and dreams for Ascend for the future. “I see a lot of other companies becoming involved and wanting to play, and collaborate and share as well. And a whole new template for advertising and the way that we empower conscious companies—brands that are really making a difference on this planet to also be content creators on ascend to a whole new economy. I see Ascend being a part of a whole new economy that really supports people in sharing their gifts and living life fully and authentically.”
She continued: “I see Ascend really helping to uplevel the way that humanity is expressing its creativity and innovation, and maybe also inspiring the next wave of social media.”
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