Decentralized, open source social media has been around for a while now. AFAIK, Mastodon is the most popular implementation, but the AT protocol has a lot of energy (money) behind it. Of course, there are others…
While I understand the appeal of direct messaging and micro-blogging, I really miss the early days of Instagram the most. To me, microblogging is designed for public consumption, and is less problematic under the control of a centralized authority (Twitter). Instagram, in its original form, was designed for private consumption and does not function well under a corporation. I want to see what my friends are up to and I never want to see an advertisements or content from strangers unless its a comment on my friend’s content, presumably from someone they know or have otherwise explicitly allowed to comment.
On a technical level, I am wondering if anyone is using or hosting any of these services. I abandoned Facebook and Instagram many years ago and am considering hosting something myself that my friends and I can use, probably sometime next year. Anyone who has attempted to do this already, I’d appreciate your anecdotes and lessons learned.
Disclaimer: I don’t want to discuss the merits and/or pitfalls of the current, predominantly corporate, social media landscape (Twitter, Meta, etc.). All of that has been discussed to death already. I am only interested in experiences hosting or engaging with FOSS, decentralized social media platforms. Feel free to bring up the mainstream platforms as a point of comparison (especially in terms of specific features), but I do want to stay on topic here.
Been catching up on the Twitter exodus zeitgeist, and I realized I signed up for Fosstodon in 2019. I’ve been clicking around and so far the web UI is pretty snappy, but it’s hard to find people I’ve followed on Twitter.
One frustrating thing is that you can follow users from different instances like mastodon.xyz, but it’s not a one-click solution. You have to click a link, copy-paste the user handle and paste it into your own instance. That flow makes it hard to do quick follows which would aid in building a network.
tl;dr I think Mastodon’s biggest problem is lack of users and discoverability via the UI.
Yeah, I haven’t looked at Mastodon for a long time but my memory of it was that it was cludgy. There are also some privacy complaints about it. If you @ someone in a DM, it automatically adds them to it which… yikes.
I’m concerned about their donation-based revenue model. I think eventually, it will either fail or someone in a position of power at Signal will get greedy and ruin it. Do you pay them anything?
Yes I donated few times. It is possible that in time something may happen but in a medium term horizon they seem to be in a stable situation. They are nonprofit I think? And their financial situation improved, I remember at the beginning they struggled with resources to keep up with developing the apps, but now it is much better.
Signal even introduced “stories” today so it is another way how to share ephemeral photos with friends…