More alternative social networks — and towards a social media standard?

We take a look at yet another couple of alternative social networks, discuss some sounder approaches to privacy and running social networks, and the creation of a potential social standard.

Mewe.com functions very well, but it is largely a Facebook clone with more sound approach to privacy. But if they were really serious and obsessive about privacy, why not make the platform open source? And how do they make money?

Meanwhile, most people have already invested a lot of time and effort in Facebook. That’s not an excuse not to leave Facebook, but in reality, it’s one reason why the big players remain so well entrenched in the market. People have come to accept that it’s a panopticon — we obviously shouldn’t, but that’s where we are.

Privacy is great, but from the perspective of creating a vibrant social platform with lots of discourse and action, you can argue that you can have too much of it. If you have zero skin in the game, that is if you have complete anonymity, the platform risks turning into Gab.com or Twitter. The problem with brand new social networks or platforms promising privacy or free speech, is that it’s going to initially attract people who are there to precisely to spew out vitriol — it’s not going to attract people who are just there to carry on a conversation without any restraints or snooping.

When it comes to true privacy, decentralized is the way to go — another competing centralized service, and a pinky promise not to touch your data, doesn’t cut it. With a sufficiently decentralized solution, any government demands become almost moot and void, because such services are ungovernable, and legislation is just a formal recommendation without any teeth.

Mastodon is a free and open-source self-hosted social networking service. It allows anyone to host their own server node in the network, so its various user bases are spread across many different servers.  Mastodon is a part of the wider network of social networks, meaning its users to also interact with users on different open platforms that support the same protocol.

Meanwhile, in a rather timely development, Jack Dorsey from Twitter has come out stating he wants to create a social media standard, in other words, develop something of a protocol for social data. This would make social media networks operate more like email, so that users could join different networks but still communicate with each other no matter which one they’re using.

Let’s not forget, that Twitter shut down many of the healthy and useful applications that were already building using Twitter’s API, because twitter tightened the reins of their data to make room for more internal products. One such discontinued app was Storify, its purpose was to allow users to create stories by importing content from various forms of media into a timeline. Another one was Favstar, a third party app that showed how people’s Tweets were getting liked and retweeted by others on the network. In other words, Twitter doesn’t have exactly have a good track record of supporting a free and open transfer of information online and should not be leading the charge in developing any standards.

Dorsey says that “Existing social media incentives frequently lead to attention being focused on content and conversation that sparks controversy and outrage, rather than conversation which informs and promotes health“. True or not, it’s not up to any social network (or social network standard) to try and determine and govern what is informative constitutes healthy conversation. 

There already is an open, decentralized social networking protocol, called ActivityPub. If Twitter was serious about creating a protocol for the betterment of the entire web, they wouldn’t seek to restart it from scratch under their own control!

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