Hi! Welcome. You might be here because of recent policy changes at Meta, wherein Mark Zuckerberg told us in no uncertain terms he likes the taste of fascist boots. You might be here because the Facebook feed has been useless for years now, or some other thing. But you're looking to get the hell out of dodge but you're not sure where to go from here. I don't have all the answers for you. But I do have some thoughts.
This page is divided into two broad themes - first, a philosophical discussion about the inherent pitfalls of the commercial internet; and second, a concrete discussion about alternatives. You don't really need to read them in order, or even read both of them. So click here if you'd like skip to the alternatives.
There's two broad problems with corporate run social media — profit motive and a lack of oversight. These do apply broadly to a lot of internet companies, and even companies outside this sphere. But I'll go over how they relate to the problems at hand.
I have maintained since very early days that Facebook was a pointless gossip and drama mill, but it has only gotten worse since then. Facebook and its ilk, which I will refer to as "commercial social media", operate on a few very simple truths:
This creates a perverse incentive to not only increase the number of ads, but also to disguise them as something else. And – most disastrously for our sanity – it means they need to maximize the amount of time you spend on the site. Commercial social media wants, nay needs, to be the place where you spend most of your time.
And it doesn't matter how. Pictures of cats? Classic. Tragic wars abroad? Of course. Arguing with other people? Always. Positive, negative, it doesn't matter. They will exploit your attention span for profit.
You've probably heard "if you're not the customer, you're the product.[2]" That's all it is. Corporations don't provide services out of the goodness of their heart. Corporations don't have hearts. They have bills, payroll, and loans.
And separately, sometimes it turns out that the people who run these companies are not good people.
The other main problem is, well, you as the user don't have any direct control over the situation. The board, the CEO, the management, none of them were elected by you. You don't pay their checks and they're not your friends (no, not even Tom from Myspace). They don't answer to you. So when some chucklefuck at the top decides they're going to fundamentally change the way your experience works, you can like it or lump it.
Well, let's take a step back. Why is that so bothersome anyway? I mean it's their site. They can run it how they please. The problem isn't really one of ownership, it's one of social value. A place like facebook feels like a good place because your friends are there. It's a place where you meet and interact. Where, as much as policy and the law allow, anyone can meet and interact. It is a commons. It's like a city park or a shopping mall.
Except it's actually a lot more like a shopping mall than a city park. A shopping mall is private property. It's owned and managed by someone. They pay security to enforce their policies. And you can be removed for any reason. A city park is a public space in that it is actually governed publicly. It is subject to city law and if you don't like that, you can talk to elected officials, elect different officials, or stage a first amendment-protected protest. The difference is you have ownership and agency in how a park is governed, and in a mall you do not.
Commercial social media is a mall. It exists for the purpose of extracting value from you. You can hang out. You can talk to your friends. But at the end of the day, you exist in a place you have no ownership of.
All of this happens in a cycle. You've probably seen this cycle. A new service starts up. It's clean. It's shiny. It's not full of assholes. Then eventually it gets popular and the owners turn the screws to extract profit, making it worse. Eventually, this breaks the userbase and they flee elsewhere. It's enshittification.
At this point it's my strongly held opinion that we won't get out of this mess by swapping one commercial social media site for another. Eventually, they'll have to show up with some cash for their creditors and squeeze your brain for a few pennies. Or they'll get bought out by a rich fascist. Or maybe they'll just be assholes because they can.
And this is a problem that isn't going to be solved with consumer choice. Moving to a new mall with nicer policies doesn't fundamentally change the power differential between you and the owners. If you really want to break this cycle, you have to think differently about how social media is run.
What if we had social media where you did have some kind of ownership? Well, lucky us, that exists! There are open source, community-developed solutions for pretty much any mode of social media you can imagine (which I'll detail further down). So if there are viable alternatives that aren't out to get you, why aren't they the norm?
Well... they kind of suck.
The simple part is that running your own software is harder than going to a website. And one person or a group can run it for many people, but then the burden on them is even greater. Running your own infrastructure takes time and money.
The other part is that some of these solutions (especially the distributed ones) are more complicated to use. You'll have choose one server among many to sign up in the first place. You might have to understand the difference between your home server and someone else's, how messages propagate, or differences in how things are represented on different kinds of software. If you remember the hassles of the early Internet, a lot of that is echoed here.
And a lot of times, it's just missing features. Especially if you're a creator posting somewhere where you get a cut of the ad revenue. None of these are going to give that to you. I get that that's a real hard sell for some people.
I believe most of these challenges can be overcome, even for someone with minimal technical knowledge. But reasonable people will disagree, and if you find it too daunting I understand. But I think it's worth learning if you really want to escape the Zucks of the world.
I'm going to be focusing mostly on Fediverse[3] software since that's where I have experience and it's the most promising area of development lately. But first we've gotta talk about...
Bluesky is a microblogging service that started as a Twitter project to engineer a kind of Twitter that could be partially or wholly run by other people. It's a system of components that communicate over a thing called the AT Protocol, or ATProto for short. And it is heir apparent to Twitter, now that it has gone full Nazi Bar.
The short version is, if you want something like Twitter – the place where people are at and things are happening – Bluesky is it. It's not fundamentally changing the game, but it's no hassle and critically, it is not failing the Don't Be A Nazi Bar challenge (so far).
I can't really evaluate it on its Twitter-ness. As I've said before, I've never been a Twitter user. But I can evaluate it on its technical claims. Bluesky has published ATProto as an open protocol and architected their system around it because they truly believe that's the way it should be done. With this system, users can keep control over their data by running their own Personal Data Servers, or PDSes. Users control their own handles[4], giving them control over their identity. And other people can run their own Relays and AppViews, providing a different view on the network than Bluesky's twittery default. Bluesky has designed everything towards providing a "credible exit" — the idea that your identity and data can survive Bluesky itself going under.
The rub is in the Relays and AppViews. All the data processing that makes Bluesky Bluesky and not just a static webpage happens in the Relays and AppViews. The Relays pull from the PDSes and index it to create a data firehose consumed by the AppViews. AppViews present this data to the user in varying ways. And the cost of running these services increases with the amount of traffic. So if you wanted to have your own redundant Relay, it's going to cost you somewhere near as much as it costs Bluesky. And that means the likelihood of anyone else running one becomes vanishingly unlikely as Bluesky grows.
Having your data in a separate PDS controlled by you is good. But it's like owning your own seat on a bus. If the bus crashes, you can take your seat with you. You can put it in a new bus. But the seat itself is not going to get you anywhere.
At best, it seems to me that they've built a system that can be rebuilt by a successor service without you losing your data. And that's a pretty cool achievement within the bounds of Silicon Valley Startup Brain. But depending on another multi-million dollar service to pick up the torch is not user ownership or autonomy. And they haven't built something that is meaningfully different as far as the incentives we talked about earlier. Bluesky Social PBC has taken in a bunch of venture capital cash to grow rapidly, and they've got bills to pay.
Now we're getting into it. I said earlier that these solutions capture the problems of the early internet, but I want to make it clear that they also capture the promise of the early Internet. These are spaces truly built by the people who use them, and for no other purpose than to connect people. Generally, you won't find tracking, advertisements, or algorithmic recommendations. It can still, of course, be an unhealthy time sink, but the software isn't garden pathing you into addiction.
The most different thing about the fediverse experience, though, is it exists on thousands of different servers. There is no one point of control. Each server cooperates (or doesn't) with each other to create a seamlessly[5] connected web. A lot of servers operate as topic-focused communities in the way old web forums or newsgroups did. Which has similar advantages for ownership — it puts you a lot closer to the people in control, and each site can have its own governance.
Naturally, without one central voice dictating policy there is sometimes conflict between these sites. Politics is still difficult even when it's small. If you've ever been on a web forum that was in a feud with another, you'll understand the situation. But this is definitely the exception rather than the rule.
The other neat thing is there are many ways to be on the Fediverse. Let's start with the elephant in the room.
Mastodon is another twitter-like service, and probably what most people think the Fediverse is. It is emblematic of most of the "sucks" things I mentioned earlier. But it is far and away the most popular service in the fediverse. It provides a twitter-like experience that most other fediverse software imitates.
Hometown and Glitch are popular forks of Mastodon, which add some other features like threaded mode, rich text support, and other creature comforts. Other software that supports a microblogging interface are Pleroma (and its faster-moving fork Akkoma), Misskey, GoToSocial, and snac.
And yes, technically Meta's Threads federates too. But if you're getting off of Facebook and Instagram, you probably don't want to go there either.
The big area of growth lately is Pixelfed, which provides an Instagram-like interface. I guess. I don't use Instagram. But it's been growing by leaps and bounds, having just launched their mobile apps as Meta shit the bed. They've even launched a Kickstarter to fund further development.
Video is a hard problem because it takes up so much space, but PeerTube shows that many hands make light work. It's an admittedly janky alternative to YouTube, but it provides the same core service - videos and live streams. There are several topic-focused instances. My favorite is MakerTube, but also definitely checkout The Puppet Zone.
If you want something more like Twitch, there is Owncast. It's a little more technical than the rest of these in that it's designed for self-deployment. There aren't public instances you join — you have to run the software yourself and set up streaming to that. It does have fediverse integration, though, which allows people to follow your streams and get notifications when you go live.
If you're looking for a threaded discussion forum Lemmy is software that builds that with Fediverse integration. But despite the integration it's kind of a different animal. Beware trying to follow a Lemmy discussion from your Mastodon account.
There are plugins for both Wordpress and Drupal that allow sites to be followed as ActivityPub accounts.
That is an unfortunately big question. Probably the easiest thing to do is start with a Mastodon or Pixelfed account on their default servers (mastodon.social and pixelfed.social) and start exploring from there. Being on one of the default instances won't put you in a specific community, but it's a good launching point for discovering where that community might be. At least with Mastodon, you can migrate your account[6] to a new server if you find a home you like better.
The Counterforce has a really good guide on getting started on Mastodon (for punks but it's useful to everyone IMO), with specific steps that I am too lazy to enumerate here.
I think the main thing that trips people up is that there is no algorithmic recommendation. The only things you see are what your followers boost. You really need to find a few accounts to bootstrap the process of finding other interesting accounts. Some apps and sites have a "Suggested Accounts" section that can help. One thing that helped me was browsing a lot of contact pages for famous Internet people I already knew and adding their fediverse accounts.
Each site on the fediverse chooses who it communicates with. There are a fair number of instances out there that exist purely to harass, and they're blocked by a huge number of other servers. The quality and responsiveness of that blocking will depend on the quality of your instance admins. Most of the things that will go wrong will be solved through their support, so it's important to find a community with admins who are active and available.
Every instance will have a set of rules. A lot of them don't allow bot accounts, for example. It's important to read them, as they set (or don't set) a lot of expectations for how you will interact with other people. Beware any instance that doesn't have published rules.
Inevitably you will find someone you don't want to talk to. You have a lot of options for how to deal with this. Blocking is always an option, but you can also mute people for a limited time (say, if they're going on about something you find annoying but you'll checkin later). You can ignore posts based on keywords (so you could, for example, choose not to see any post talking about Mark Zuckerberg). You can report users to your instance admins (or other instances' admins), where they can take broader action like blocking the account across your instance, or blocking the offender's entire instance.
Good luck, we're all rooting for you. :)