Corporate social media is hurting us, but it’s intertwined with so much of our lives. It’s not clear there’s another option, and when one “goes down” another, more addictive and equally destructive, pops up. Often times the new ones, like Bluesky or TikTok, appear better, but they will always get more and more destructive. They have a structural needs to grow users and revenue due to the fact they’re beholden to shareholders and advertisers.
Alternatives exist. Thanks to the open standard ActivityPub, and often refereed to being connected to the Fediverse. There’s all kinds of decentralized social networks to accomplish a variety of tasks. Though many are newer, they have the advantage of being able to run in small servers, customized to a community’s needs, and are almost all open source. The key power of ActivityPub means they’re all interoperable, so that even if you use a small private server, you can see and interact with others on different applications.
An example is Mastodon. There’s thousands of public and private servers out there. I’m on Mastodon.ie run out of Ireland. I follow hundreds of people throughout the world almost all using different versions. While there is a Mastodon application, I use a different one called Ivory. If I want to take my Mastodon account to a different instance, I can.
All kinds of Fediverse applications are built on ActivityPub. The most popular is Mastodon, which is a Twitter/X/Bluesky microblogging service. There’s Lemmy, which is meant to function like Reddit. PixelFed, which has a Instragram like focus on photos. Loops for TikTok. PeerTube for YouTube In addition to these sets of features, applications built using AcitivyPub are also interoperable. Imagine if Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Twitter all shared feeds.
ActivityPub alternatives have challenges like limited adoption, can be intimidating, and have a high adoption for the average person. There are hundreds of people working on solving these problems from a design and technical standpoint. Which is great. They’ll only get better, more fully functioning, as time and adoption grows.
Corporate social media is very sticky. They’re excellent at getting you on their service, and even better at keeping you there. They spend billions of dollars to try and keep you addicted, even at the expense of your and your communities health. They seem they have a near invincible hold on attention and our society.
The good news is history is rife with dead social networks. MySpace, Friendster, and soon Twitter all seemed like they had huge holds. But as fast as alternatives gained viral adoption, these dead networks slowly disappeared into irrelevance. That means that even if Facebook seems invincible, it is very much built with clay feet.
Instead of trying to compete head to head with corporate social media on the areas they spend billions, leverage what is unique and powerful about Fediverse applications, take ActivityPub’s advantage of small scale, the customizability of the open source software, and build locally for small communities.
**We can de-viral corporate social media **from our lives by approaching it not as a technology or design problem, but as a public health problem. Almost everyone acknowledges a bunch of the ills of social media, we need to help engage in conversation with them on the full harms, understand their needs, make sure alternatives can meet those needs, and onboard them to the alternatives. We can onboard people one at a time, iterate on the product offering, and slowly get people off corporate social networks.
I live on a smallish island of 7,000 full time residents that balloons to above 20,000 in the summer. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are all interwoven into the fabric of our community. But they don’t have to be. They’re hurting our community, and we can stop them together.
