Social Media Alternatives

Censorship on Facebook and Reddit is getting worse and worse - particularly when it comes to progressive and socialist content. That trend is only going to accelerate. It would be smart to find backups and alternatives for Facebook and Reddit now, before leftist communities are smashed, shut down, or censored out of existence.

When Google announced that Google Plus was going to be shut down, a group of us there got together to research social media for a new home. We gathered a lot of data and stored it in a Google Docs spreadsheet that I created. I published that spreadsheet to the web here:

Social Media Alternatives

To summarize, the primary candidates were MeWe, Mastodon, and DreamWidth.

MeWe picked up a lot of enthusiastic converts. The owner had put a lot of effort into getting G+'s soon-to-be expatriates on MeWe. I, however, was a skeptic. Here's why.

MeWe is owned by a libertarian businessman. The site is effectively a "walled garden"; anything you write there is invisible to outside search engines. So new people will never stumble on your work, and no one can share anything that you write with people outside of MeWe. 

That is, unless changes have been made in the last year. The owner said he was going to have some of those issues fixed, but I had the strong impression that the "fixes" he was talking about weren't really going to address the issues. Basically, MeWe is sort of a web ghetto. I also worry because I don't entirely trust the owner. I've been screwed by sites that were owned by venture capitalists too many times.

Of course, the real problem with ANY competitor to Facebook is the user base. No matter how great an alternative is, if your friends aren't there too there's no point in posting there. And if not much is posted there, your friends don't have a reason to join. Catch-22.

I have a MeWe account myself, but I make very little use of it. I started a couple of groups there: "Facebook Refugees" and "Change the World" (a socialist/revolution group). Facebook Refugees has a lot of members, but there's nothing much of interest being posted there. People still join, though.
But as I said, I only go there to approve new members for the Facebook Refugees group.

If you try to post a link to a MeWe article, what others see is an invite to join MeWe - not the article itself. I don't think you can read anything there unless you join. That's part of the whole "walled garden" thing. You can only read stuff there if you're already there. It's basically a dead end. And as your posts get older, they disappear to all intents and purposes. So even if you write something absolutely brilliant, it will never, EVER go viral - or make an impact outside of MeWe.

MeWe is free, but there are paid subscriptions available with extra features. They're a bit pushy about marketing those paid subs.

Mastodon

Mastodon is an open-source self-hosted federated social media site. I like that it's not owned by any one person or entity, and it does seem to have some activity on it so far. But again, it's nowhere near the membership level to make it worthwhile to spend much time there. Maybe that will change. 

Perhaps I should explain the whole "federated" thing. There are individual server-hosts for Mastodon. They have a limited number of members. But all of the hosts are effectively connected by the software, so you can follow anyone on any Mastodon host. One drawback to Mastodon is that at this point it's not possible to create groups there. You can follow other users and be followed, but as far as I've been able to discover there are no groups on Mastodon. Also, Mastodon works via hashtags - you must include hashtags in your posts or they're unlikely to be discovered.

Another drawback to Mastodon is that you're limited to 500 characters per post. Still, it's an interesting and appealing option. Not having a single owner is a big advantage.

DreamWidth

I'll admit up front that I am biased in favor of DreamWidth.  It's a separately-owned code fork of LiveJournal, and is considerably older than MeWe or Mastodon. It's owned by a couple of former LJ staffers; they seem very idealistic and supportive of free speech. That said, although I have some friends on Dreamwidth, I haven't been getting much interaction there. It's pretty dead. I wish that it wasn't.

It allows you to create and join groups. Posts aren't limited in length. Free accounts don't get image hosting, but you can link to images hosted elsewhere. There's a fine degree of control of who can see each post that you make in your own account; you can create all sorts of filters, or post publicly.

Posts can be linked to outside of DreamWidth, and anyone can read public posts there without having to join. Search engines such as Google are able to crawl public posts, so they come up in search results.

All of those social media alternatives are free, although MeWe tends to nag you a little about getting a free trial of the paid version. Dreamwidth has a paid version too, but the free version is totally functional and they don't nag. As far as I know, Mastodon is just plain free.

Apps

Just a note, but if you're interested in secure communication, I'd suggest following Edward Snowden; he sometimes recommends apps to use or stay away from, and he knows what he's talking about. Right now I have ProtonMail for secure email. Signal and Telegram are both options for encrypted IM and telephony. All are currently available for free.