I haven’t read the full article due to sign up paywall, but…
First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikTok’s last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying people’s audiences overnight, with one act of government.
How is decentralised social media going to help with this if the entire point of decentralisation is the opposite?
On decentralized media (Mastodon at the very least), you can move your account and your subscribers to any other instance whenever you want. You move with your audience, and they’ll barely notice any change, using the same app to keep following the same person automatically.
And this is why I’m still on .ml there’s not a way to move on Lemmy. Yet
Luckily, there’s normally little cost to switching Lemmy instances anyway. You can even probably take the same username and register on another instance, quickly rebuild your feed and that’s mostly it.
As everything is connected and there’s not much reason accumulating account age/karma/you name it, the loss is pretty minor.
Yea agreed, but not Lemmy or Mastodon. Or, really anything with ActivityPub as these places are an echo chamber filled with trigger happy jannies who will ban you from a community if you have a differing of opinion to their groupthink.
Every person that has ever made a post like this has multiple comments defending Nazis.
Good thing I’m not defending any neo-Nazis
Sorry, I don’t carry on conversations with Nazi sympathizers. I hope you have an awful day.
I’m Jewish so it’s not possible. But cool story bro.
You do know that there are jewish nazis right?
i dont disagree implicitly with activitypub being echo chamber prone but its interesting that your most recent replies are litigating the veracity of a nazi salute caught on national television
Well, as a Jew, I haven’t seen anything else from Elon that’s emblematic of being a Nazi. Sure, he has some right wing beliefs, but those were pretty centrist ideals prior to the past decade. And I have encountered real neo-Nazis who have wished death upon my [k expletive] ass and attempted doxing. I think Elon is just an awkward person in general, but I’m not buying into the stats quo hype that he’s some neo-fascist, Hitler sympathizer. That’s just my opinion. You’re welcome to believe what you want too 👍
He made Twitter into a Nazi bar. This too. There’s plenty more that you can certainly find yourself if you actually look.
Are you suggesting that we shouldn’t be worried about toxically insecure people in power when they are behaving awkwardly? Does an appearance of awkwardness grant automatic innocence?
I have been be intensely awkward with my insecurity in the past, and in my awkwardness i have definitely hurt people. If the victims of my insecurity brushed me off as awkward they would be enabling me to continue to harm others
I am so happy I have an account on here, even if some people can be quite abrasive
How do we protect ourselves from propagandists and censors? Large, small, popular and individual.
You do your research :)
I’m trying to find one right now that doesn’t suck. I want one where I can microblog, share pics, and videos to my friends and family. Essentially Facebook. Friendica is EMPTY. I deleted Meta products. I’m not on X. There is no alternative.
Isn’t Mastodon a good alternative? It’s a microblogging service like Twitter. You can post statuses, pictures, videos, etc.
You can also make it private and set it to approve your followers.
I guess, but I don’t want the job of trying to talk people into using a platform. No one I know has even heard of it. The platform is good for what I want, but no one I know locally is there and getting them on it seems unlikely.
Honestly Mastodon is the closest thing atm unless you can get more people to join Friendica
Setup an account and start using it. Learn the ins and outs of it, then offer to teach your friends and family who might be interested. Someone has to be the first, then that person has to find their ‘first follower’. It isn’t easy, but with persistence it will pay off
I set up an account and have absolutely no way of finding a single friend.
The way I did it was by using it a lot. If you see someone post something you find interesting, follow that person, interact with their posts, and if you see a post one of your friends will find interesting, send it to them. Another great thing about most (all?) Fediverse apps is that you don’t need an account to view a post. I still have friends who send me Twitter links and I have to let them know that I can’t view it because I don’t have the app or an account, but I still send them Mastodon, Lemmy, Loops and Pixelfed links. I’m not pressuring people into joining, but I’m showing them how I’m using it and let them make their own decision.
How do you think Twitter/Facebook started? If you can talk enough people into losing trust in those mainstream platforms, they’ll eventually catch up.
I’ll give it the old college try. That works on 2 levels.
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404media paywalled? It’s free to create an account
If it’s free, why does it say “This post is for paid members only”?
Not this article. It’s free. Paid subscribers can read it without ads, is that what you meant?
Some of their posts they do reserve for paid subscribers, but those are usually behind-the-scenes type things, not the journalism.
I wish I could subscribe but I’m not $100+ dollars a year rich. Still impressive that they are doing DIY tech journalism.
No it wasn’t free, I got that message and couldn’t read it.
Try again, I just read it for free. I’ll post it here just in case:
https://www.404media.co/decentralized-social-media-is-the-only-alternative-to-the-tech-oligarchy/
Decentralized Social Media Is the Only Alternative to the Tech Oligarchy Jason Koebler Jan 21, 2025 at 12:33 PM
The TikTok ban and Donald Trump’s rise to power show how fragile our social media accounts are. We must normalize and invest in decentralized social media.
If it wasn’t already obvious, the last 72 hours have made it crystal clear that it is urgent to build and mainstream alternative, decentralized social media platforms that are resistant to government censorship and control, are not owned by oligarchs and dominated by their algorithms, and in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere easily and without restriction.
Besides all of the “normal” problems with corporate social media—the surveillance capitalism, the AI spam, the opaque algorithms—let’s take stock of what has happened in the last few days.
First, millions of small business owners and influencers who make a living on TikTok were left to beg their followers in TikTok’s last moments to follow them elsewhere in hopes of being able to continue their businesses on other corporate social media platforms. This had the effect of fracturing and destroying people’s audiences overnight, with one act of government.
TikTok has since come back, but it is still unclear what the future of the platform is, and TikTok now exists at the whim of President Trump and is beholden to him to an unknown extent. TikTok’s status in the Untied States is still up in the air—it is still not available for download in the iOS App Store or the Google Play Store, and it could disappear at any moment if service providers like Oracle decide that Trump’s executive order and assurances that they will not be prosecuted or fined are not enough assurance to keep the app online.
Elon Musk, who had already turned X into a cesspool of hate and an overt tool to get President Trump elected, is now formally part of the Trump administration, meaning the platform is literally owned by a member of the Trump White House.
Meta has made an overt shift to the right, and Mark Zuckerberg has himself become a Trump booster. The platform is making its content moderation worse, has declared that immigrants and LGBTQ+ people are legitimate targets for hate speech, and has made many of these changes at the behest of the Trump White House and Stephen Miller, according to The New York Times.
Zuckerberg, Musk, TikTok CEO Shou Chew, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Apple CEO Tim Cook, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were all in attendance at Trump’s inauguration Monday. There is now no major corporate-owned social media platform that is not aligned with Trump or beholden to him in some way, and nearly every American is on at least one of these platforms.
The TikTok ban highlights, as we’ve seen before, that businesses and accounts built on these centralized, corporate social media platforms are incredibly fragile and can be taken away at any moment, whether by government action, algorithm tweaks that destroy reach, a platform deciding that a specific account does not comply with its ever-changing rules and political systems, etc. We have made clear at 404 Media that one of the reasons we ask our readers for their email addresses is because we have seen media outlets that rely disproportionately on social media distribution die over and over again. Individual influencers and account holders are now seeing how fragile what they have built really is.
The solution to this is decentralized, federated, portable social media in which users own their follower list and can port it elsewhere when the server they are posting on changes its rules, changes its politics, is threatened or attacked by the government, or otherwise becomes untenable. Mastodon’s ActivityPub and Bluesky’s AT.Protocol have provided the base technology layer to make this possible, and have laid important groundwork over the last few years to decorporatize and decentralize the social internet.
The problem with decentralized social media platforms thus far is that their user base is minuscule compared to platforms like TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram, meaning the cultural and political influence has lagged behind them. You also cannot directly monetize an audience on Bluesky or Mastodon—which, to be clear, is a feature, not a bug—but also means that the value proposition for an influencer who makes money through the TikTok creator program or a small business that makes money selling chewing gum on TikTok shop or a clothes brand that has figured out how to arbitrage Instagram ads to sell flannel shirts is not exactly clear. I am not advocating for decentralized social media to implement ads and creator payment programs. I’m just saying that many TikTok influencers were directing their collective hundreds of millions of fans to follow them to Instagram or YouTube, not a decentralized alternative.
This doesn’t mean that the fediverse or that a decentralized Instagram or TikTok competitor that runs on the AT.Protocol is doomed. But there is a lot of work to do. There is development work that needs to be done (and is being done) to make decentralized protocols easier to join and use and more interoperable with each other. And there is a massive education and recruitment challenge required to get the masses to not just try out decentralized platforms but to earnestly use them. Bluesky’s growing user base and rise as a legitimately impressive platform that one can post to without feeling like it’s going into the void is a massive step forward, and proof that it is possible to build thriving alternative platforms. The fact that Meta recently blocked links to a decentralized Instagram alternative shows that big tech sees these platforms, potentially, as a real threat.
And the far right has unfortunately shown that even small social media platforms can have an outsized impact on national politics and can be used to create political power. A legion of the worst people on Earth have spent years building admittedly resilient alternative social media sites after being deplatformed from or rage quitting sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. Places like Rumble, Gab, Truth Social, Odysee, and Patriots.Win are full of the worst America has to offer, but people on these websites have been successful in seeding (often false, often hateful) narratives that filter up the power chain and often end up getting repeated by Donald Trump or on more widely viewed right wing media like Fox News.
I bring up these platforms not to champion them but to highlight that being pushed out of or voluntarily leaving more mainstream platforms did not kill the ideas that were being shared by these people; in fact, their ideas now make up a core part of the current administration’s policies.
This is all to say that it is possible to build alternatives to Elon Musk’s X, Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram, and whatever TikTok will become. It is happening, and it is necessary. The richest, most powerful people in the world have all aligned themselves and their platforms with Donald Trump. But their platforms’ relevance and importance doesn’t necessarily have to last forever. A different way is possible, if we build it.
Thanks for posting the text. I went to it again and this time instead of saying it was for paid subscribers only, it said I could view the article if I would sign up for a free account. I suppose they randomly pick one or the other approach, or maybe they try to get you to pay for a sub first, then try to get you to go for a free signup to at least get your email address.
I’ve never seen them use the “paid subscribers only” verbiage except on that bonus content stuff – maybe it is a bug that you saw that, or maybe the page accidentally loaded a different article somehow.
The “paid subscribers have ad free access” message looks like a paywall if you read it quickly, maybe something like that happened.
Either way most sites I don’t like giving an email address, but they have a respectable reason. They didn’t always require it, but scrapers kept reposting their work for ad profits, etc.. And for what it’s worth I don’t get any emails from them.
Decentralized money as well. We need to move away from the control of government and corporations (they are now one and the same). I’m putting more and more of my money in bitcoin. The dollar will continue to erode while wages stay flat. And Trump and his new oligarch buddies will completely decimate the American economy and stock market while they make out like bandits, leaving everyone else the bag holder. Your 401k isn’t safe anymore.
Same but with Monero. I don’t need my friends, neighbors, $5 wrench attackers, and governments knowing how much money I have. And neither should you.
There’s an add-on for Bitcoin called the “Lightning Network” that adds onion routing like Tor.
Yes, but it does not work well. You constantly get failing payments due to inadequate channel liquidity unless you’re using a large centralized wallet provider and using a large centralized wallet provider defeats the purpose of peer to peer digital cash that’s uncensorable.
I’ve been using the Electrum wallet for years now with no issues.
@explodicle @shortwavesurfer as someone that is using it profissionaly, we dont have route for payments more times than I would like to admit…
Electrum or a different wallet?
@explodicle yes, we where using electrum… LN has a routing problem… You neednto open channels with the major players and se of them charge for it
Trust me bro, if your underground stash of money is robbed or stolen because you refuse to trust a bank to safeguard it, it will be considered your fault
Word.
Tildes (a closed garden Reddit alternative) frequently love to reminisce about the days of small forum communities. Maybe we need to bring them back.
Let’s call it by it’s name: neofeudalism/technofeudalism
Tech Broligarchy*
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There’s another alternative, which is no social media at all. There is no particular problem that it solved. If it disappeared, would your quality of life be worse in any way?
I dont want to deal with people gore spamming every single Matrix channel again.
I don’t understand this sentence. The two words I don’t know in this context are “gore” and “matrix”
Gore is probably gross medical pictures. Matrix is a chat room program.
