Decentralised

| 2 minutes
ramblings

I believe decentralised services are the way forward. Like email and websites our social media services should be decentralised.

After Elon bought Twitter it has been in a dead spiral down. Third party clients were blocked. Users rate limited. While he claimed the bird was freed, it is more locked down than ever. After the shitshow of Twitter, Reddit decided it was their turn to make a mess. We all know how that turned out, our favourite Reddit clients do not work anymore.

These companies forget that they exist because people ask questions, follow other people, answer, post funny things etc. on their platforms. Without the platform would be dead and would soon be forgotten, like MySpace, Hyves (small Dutch social media platform), and in a sense Facebook.

Companies need to make profits for their shareholders, ultimately it is the goal of a company to make value. That is why they often sort to showing ads or worse make profiles of you and sell that to the highest bidder. The whole ad tech industry should be made illegal. The amount of data that is collected about you is shocking (post for another day, there is on in my drafts).

I am kind of happy that Facebook made Threads (the Twitter clone by Instagram). It is build on ActivityPub, the protocol where Mastodon is build on, so in time people on Mastodon could follow Threads accounts and vice versa. Famous people and companies can use that.

Just an hour ago I read about the fact that the Dutch government has a Mastodon instance: https://social.overheid.nl/public/local 👀 this makes me very happy.

I dived some deeper into it and it turns out that more governments and organisations have their own Mastodon server. Think it is an awesome idea. You have instant verification, the person really belongs to the government or organisation.

Instances

Governments
News organistions
Universities
Other organisations

Please let me know if you found more. Will update this list.

Next

Microblogging is the first step. There are other services to tackle.

Other decentralised replacements for big single entities: