Every new year I commit to giving social networks other than Facebook a serious effort. I read my news feed on other networks before visiting FB. I cross post things to other networks in addition to FB.
This year I'm changing it up a bit. Due to the ongoing meltdown of Twitter, there have been massive migrations to other platforms, some newer than others. The demographic trends in those migrations make some of these more appealing to me than others.
I will be focusing almost all of my new social media interaction efforts on Mastodon for this year's resolution.
I am @[email protected] or http://mastodon.social/@sparr and I invite all my friends and acquaintances to follow and interact there. I may eventually create one or more additional profiles in the fediverse for specific sorts of content, TBD.
Mastodon is a federated service. It works kinda like email. You make an account on a server of your choice, the same way you choose gmail or hotmail or your own domain and server for email, but you can still interact with people on other servers. Most Mastodon servers talk to each other, but some block each other due to incompatible content and moderation policies, e.g. on an instance meant for kids you might have trouble following someone from an instance meant for porn. Learn more or just find a server to join at https://joinmastodon.org/
The way that Mastodon servers talk to each other isn't restricted to Mastodon servers. The language they speak (“ActivityPub”) is free and open to implement and use. Mastodon looks and works a lot like Twitter, with short mostly-text posts, sometimes small images or videos, presented in a feed/stream. There's another platform called Pixelfed that looks and works more like Instagram or Flickr, hosting mostly big images, presenting them in more of a gallery feed. There's another platform called Peertube that looks and works like Youtube, hosting large/long videos. There are also platforms for long form blogging, including Write Freely (where you'll find me as @[email protected] but you probably don't need to follow that since my Mastodon account will boost most of my Write Freely posts). All of these platforms can and do talk to each other. Users on them can interact with each other. You can reply to a Peertube video or follow a Write Freely author from your Mastodon account. You can boost Mastodon posts on your Pleroma account, etc.
And this isn't limited to “new” platforms. There is a Wordpress plugin so that your Wordpress site will send and receive content via ActivityPub, allowing users of Mastodon or Pleroma etc to directly follow your blog and boost your posts to their followers, rather than just copying and pasting links. Tumblr is working on support currently as well.
This system isn't perfect. It's experiencing growing pains as millions of people join a network that previously only had a few hundred thousand users. There's work being done on moderation and privacy and client features. New clients are being written almost daily. But it's getting better, and it was already good enough for me to use and love years ago. I strongly recommend you give it a try.
I'll close by mentioning that I intend to remain active in the following other places, although I'll be checking and posting to Mastodon and Write Freely first for a while:
https://facebook.com/sparr0 https://reddit.com/u/sparr https://fetlife.com/sparr https://sparr.substack.com
PS: My understanding is that significant chunks of the Twitter exodus are also headed for Tumblr.com, Post.news, and Hivesocial.app. While they mostly don't appeal to me, I include them here in case they are a better fit for you.
#NewYearNewNetworks #SocialMedia #SocialNetwork #Facebook #Reddit #Twitter #Mastodon #Substack #fediverse #ActivityPub