Crushes.fsu and finding love as an FSU student.
To start off this exhibit at the museum, the account @crushes.fsu will be discussed.
@crushes.fsu is an instagram page that acts as an anonymous way to confess, come out, or express feelings and/or desire to fellow FSU students, without having such anonymity compromised or investigated. This is done by anonymously having students reply to a google form (without any prior requirements asked of them), insert a response, and submit it for review, which then is posted to the followers to examine, critique, laugh at, etc. It is akin to a public forum of love confessions, juvenile in a way, but incredibly warm and well-meaning, despite its controversy, strange confessions, and even rare occurrences of abnormal submissions passing the radar of students.
@crushes.fsu is a place that, I, as an FSU student, have posted a few confessions to (I will not be exposing myself) out of curiosity and because I was wanted to understand the public response to my random shenanigans.
This originally started off as a passion project between friends as an emulation of a skeletion of anonymously encouraging students to admit their feelings to students they fancied. This originated in universities, but the goal for @crushes.fsu was to help assist the two lead admins dark mode and light mode, to help their anonymous friend find a significant other. Wherever he is, I genuinely hope he finds a significant other as soon as he can, for his friends really made an account inspired by him, that a tenth of currently enrolled FSU students are implied to follow, under the best circumstances. A few other students have reported to have been paired off through this accounts' matchmaker services, a mixer event, and comments encouraging those that anonymously confessed, to directly message the person who was listed on such accounts. Of course, this is anecdotal and these students are in the minority, but for some, this worked about as well as Whisper (an anonymous confession app), with a few less steps.
Of course, the originator of the account had various life events get in the way of their posting, so they recruited two extra staff members (garnet and gold, akin to Florida State's colors) to pick up the slack and maintain the account long after their departure to better pastures (and other gimmick accounts) in Korea.
Their testimonials are as followed:
