“I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” Abraham Lincoln.
I could also have gone with “Getting to know you, getting to know all about you,” from The King and I.
Social networking has become an essential and inescapable part of our social fabric. At it’s most positive, it enables us to meet new friends, renew old friendships, and stay engaged with family and friends across the country and around the world. But like any tool, it can be used for good or for ill. In it’s darker moments, it’s a channel for manipulation, intimidation, disinformation, hate, grievance and fear, as well as serving as an Orwellian surveillance telescreen. (See the post on Social Networking).
Is it possible to reap the benefits of this technology in a safe space where we have control over what we see and who we interact with, where our personal information is not exploited, and where our privacy is respected?
The answer is a qualified, yes. Privacy-focused social networking services are emerging. There are a growing number of such sites, and things are changing rapidly. I recommend just a few here for your consideration.
Mastodon and BlueSky are free, open-source, federated, decentralized microblogging platforms. Users can share short posts containing text, images, videos and links to external sites. Users have control over whom they interact with and what content appears in their feeds. They both serve as privacy-enhanced versions of X/Twitter. There are no ads, and personal information is neither aggregated nor sold. Their business models are evolving, but at the moment they are supported by some combination of investment, donations and sponsorships. Both have millions of users and are growing.
The link to Mastodon is: https://mastodon.social/
The link to Bluesky is: https://bsky.app/
Pixelfed is a free, open-source, federated, decentralized image sharing platform. Users can share images, videos, stories and collections. Users have control over whom they interact with and what content appears in their feeds. It serves as a privacy-enhanced version of Instagram. There are no ads, and personal information is neither aggregated nor sold. Its business model is evolving, but at the moment it’s supported by investment. It has half a million users and is growing.
The link to Pixelfed is: https://pixelfed.org/
While all three of these services are privacy-focused in the sense that they do not aggregate or sell your personal information, they are not necessarily secure. What you post publicly, or perhaps even privately in direct messages, could be surreptitiously collected by hackers.
What does it mean to be federated and decentralized? In short, it means that there can be multiple instances of a service, each under separate administration, and each interoperating with all other instances. Imagine that you took X/Twitter, TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram, and Facebook and seamlessly connected them so you could post anything from anywhere and all your followers would be guaranteed to see it. And if you wanted to leave one platform for another, you could bring all your content and all your followers with you. This model is called by some the Fediverse.
While not federated or decentralized, I would be remiss if I did not mention Signal. We discussed Signal at length in the post on Private Text Messaging. For small groups of people who know each other, it’s a great platform to privately and securely share text, images, videos and links.
As we discussed in the post, Show Me The Money, business models matter. It’s not clear to me that the current business model of any of these services is sustainable over the long term. Expect them to evolve. And if we are all better served if they don’t migrate to an ad-based revenue model, be prepared to pay a subscription fee in the future. Infrastructure, operations and content moderation cost money, and to the workmen their wages. Speaking for myself, I would rather pay a modest fee for a service I value than be the product.
So how might you proceed? I suggest you take one or more of them out for test drive and see how they suit you. As you do so, be thoughtful what you choose to share.
Information provided in this post is subject to the disclaimer in the first post of this series.