Better Social Media?

One of the things I love about Penguicon is the variety of talks on offer. I can take in a panel on Anime, then go to a very technical discussion on ssh, and  move on to hearing a science fiction author read from their work. It is all good. And one talk I got to at a recent Penguicon was by Ed Platt, who has presented at Penguicon with some regularity and usually it is something interesting, and usually something related to privacy. On this occasion, he presented a talk called Re-Decentralizing the Web, which impressed me as a basis for doing some investigation and reporting back to HPR. I contacted to Ed to see if he might be interested in doing something himself, and he declined, but gave me permission to use his material in any way that helped. So I am taking his work as a beginning point and expanding on it just a bit for the HPR audience.

So, why is his talk called Re-Decentralizing the Web? Simply, the Web (and the Internet generally) were fairly decentralized at one time. Those of us who have been around for a while can remember when you might get on the Internet through a school account, or a local ISP via dial-up. The social media we had then were primarily e-mail and Usenet Newsgroups, and both of these were inherently decentralized. There was no central server for e-mail, just protocols that defined how messages would pass from one server to another. Newsgroups also had different servers that would accept and pass along messages without any central server involved. And then there was Gopher, which few people even remember any longer, which let people find documents on servers mostly located in various universities. You never heard of it because the Web made it completely obsolete. And the early Web was decentralized as well, with a variety of servers using a protocol (Hyper-text Transfer Protocol) that let anyone log on to a site and download a page.

But in 2019 we face a much different world. While there is still some variety available for e-mail, it is the case that just two providers have over 50% of the market (Apple and Google). Usenet newsgroups have nearly disappeared except as a place for sharing binary files. And a handful of Web sites such as Facebook have locked up so much activity that to many people Facebook *is* the Internet. And the social media options that most people use are very limited and very centralized: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram (owned by Facebook), and Snapchat (facing heavy competition by Instagram and Facebook’s money. It will probably be bought by one of the big companies like Amazon in next year or so.)  So what was a very decentralized cyberspace at one time is becoming highly centralized and controlled by a small number of corporations. In fact, Amy Webb just released a book called The Big Nine ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07H7G7CMN/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 ) that says it is 6 companies in the U.S., and 3 in China. The US companies she calls “The G-Mafia” for Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon. And the Chinese companies are BAT (Baidu, AliBaba, and Tencent).

In the face of this oligopoly control, what can users do to regain control of their online lives and maybe have a little privacy? And that is where Ed’s talk went. He pointed out that there are options that are decentralized that we can try to use. That is not to say that there aren’t trade-offs involved. I personally am not a model of purity since I use Facebook pretty heavily for a couple of reasons: 1) That is where all of my family and friends are located, and most of the groups I belong to are there as well; and 2) I am doing publicity on Facebook for a group I am committed to. Facebook has a big advantage in its ubiquity, and you cannot deny that. Still, I do have friends that I don’t find on Facebook. Until recently, I would find them on Google+, but that has just been closed down, so it occasioned a lot of discussion about where to go next. So for all of these reasons it seemed like a good time to take a closer look at the options. Note that just how much each of them protects your privacy can vary, as is the degree of decentralization, so I will try to cover all of the pertinent points for each app that I investigate in detail. But note that I have no intention of covering all of them, this list is for your edification should you wish to investigate your options.

The Applications

MeWe

“Like Facebook, but with privacy.” That’s the motto of MeWe.

Ello

“THE CREATORS NETWORK

Ello is a global community of artists dedicated to creative excellence. Built by artists, for artists.”

Diaspora

Decentralization is the biggest selling point of this network. It is a federation of servers, where anyone can set up a server, and others can join.

Pluspora

As you might think from the name, this is related to Diaspora. In fact, it is an instance of Diaspora that is built to resemble Google+.

BitChute

This is the decentralized alternative to YouTube.

Mastodon

This is a federated alternative to Twitter, where instead of “tweets” you write “toots”

Textile

This is an open-source and privacy-respecting alternative to sharing photos on Facebook.

PixelFed

Kind of a federated alternative to Instagram. It is pretty new, but looks interesting.

Wire

An open-source encrypted messaging app that lets you sign up with just a user name, no phone number needed.

Signal

An open-source encrypted messaging app that is better known, but requires you to let your correspondents have your phone number.

GNU Social

This is a continuation of the StatusNet project. Mastodon is an alternative implementation of GNU Social.

Scuttlebutt

This is a peer-to-peer network that also works offline.  

MediaGoblin

MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc. It is also decentralized.

Freenet

Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish “freesites” (web sites accessible only through Freenet) and chat on forums, without fear of censorship. Freenet is decentralised to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in “darknet” mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.

So, this is quite a list of applications. What I plan to do next is take at least a few of them one at a time and explore how they work. Every app has both strengths and weaknesses, and none of them are really “one-size-fits-all”. But knowing your options is step one in making some changes.

Listen to the audio version of this post on Hacker Public Radio!

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Pluspora

Once upon a time, there was social network from Google called Orkut, Or was it Buzz? Oh wait, it was called Google Plus. In the final analysis it served mostly to prove that Google cannot do social, but in many ways it was much better than the alternatives. People with technical backgrounds were far more …

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MeWe

MeWe is the other platform that ended up hosting a large number of Google+ refugees. It has some very good features, and also some differences with alternatives like Diaspora. MeWe is not open-source or distributed, but does have a strong privacy focus. It’s Privacy Bill of Rights states: You own your personal information & content. …

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Diaspora

I don’t know if Diaspora was the first of the alternatives to come along, but it was certainly the first I was aware of. It got a lot of attention for the college students who first put it together (and remember that Facebook was originally created by a college student, Mark Zuckerberg). The four students, …

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Mastodon

As mentioned earlier, Diaspora was one of the earliest alternative, privacy-respecting social media platforms, but it was focused on being an alternative to Facebook (and it has done this fairly well). But that leaves the other big platform of the social world, Twitter. Twitter has deservedly been attacked for being a sewer, but there also …

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The Fediverse

I first mentioned in Better Social Media? that I heard a talk by Ed Platt that got me started on the new kind of social media. Well, Ed was one of the panelists at Penguicon 2019 on a panel about The Fediverse which helped me to bring this into a better focus. Also on the …

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ActivityPub Conference 2019

In September of 2019 the first conference devoted to ActivityPub took place in Prague, Czech Republic, and while I did not attend it I was fortunate enough to find videos of the talks posted online. Since I think anyone who follows my stuff will be likely be interested in this, I want to give my …

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OcapPub

ActivityPub Social websites first got us talking and sharing with our friends online, then turned into echo-chamber content silos, and finally emerged in their mature state as surveillance capitalist juggernauts, powered by the effluent of our daily lives online. The tail isn’t just wagging the dog, it’s strangling it. However, there just might be a …

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PixelFed

PixelFed is a photo-sharing service similar to Instagram. But if Instagram exists and is widely used, why do we need PixelFed? I would answer that by pointing out that Instagram is owned by Facebook, and so is part of the Surveillance Capitalist realm of social media. PixelFed, by contrast, is part of the decentralized Fediverse, …

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ActivityPub Conference 2020

This was a virtual conference in this year of the plague, but there were still some interesting talks and I want to review the goings-on. As I have said previously, I am a big fan of ActivityPub, and I think it is an important development in federated social media. And I think the virtual conference …

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BookWyrm

We have another entry in the Better Social Media series. This time it is BookWyrm, which is a competitor to Goodreads but which has the advantages of begin decentralized, and allowing connections with other federated media like Mastodon and Pleroma because it uses ActivityPub. So that ticks a lot of good boxes for me. And …

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Fediverse Update May, 2022

I want to take a little time here to report on recent developments in the Fediverse. A fewf things that are promising have occured, and I think they help illustrate why the Fediverse can be so nice. Screen Readers and Mastodon The first is some welcome accessibility information from someone using the screen name of …

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