As I’ve mentioned, I think corporate social media is knowingly hurting society due to its incessant need for growth. I believe the Fediverse, the collection of applications built on ActivityPub, provide the start for solutions.

The core question with social networks though isn’t the features or quality of the code, but who is on and using it. A social network is only as good as the people using it. Called the network effect, it’s the inherent value that exists within social relationships. The more people are on the network the more valuable it is. The inverse is also true. The fewer on the network, the less valuable it is.

Modern social networks grew by optimizing the ease at which people could get on the network and connected to people with features that would drive initial stickiness and engagement. Then once they had momentum, would implement features to drive even more repeat engagement. They prioritized features that give little dopamine hits that make people keep coming back and keep scrolling. Their number one goal isn’t value but addiction.

Any features or value that they bring to you is an incidental byproduct on their path to addicting you to their product. They take your engagement and build an online profile of you, track you across every digital thing you do, and use that to sell and market products to you. Their goal is serve their customers needs and you are not their customer. You (and your data) are the product they are selling to their true customers: advertisers.

You may rightly point out that they do bring value. They allow you to share photos, thoughts, and links. They provide information about businesses, allow groups to connect, communicate, and share events. For each person and community they provide different amounts of value, sometimes keeping people engagement for just a small part of the feature set.

For example, on Orcas Island, almost everyone uses Facebook because that’s the only way to connect to important groups like the Orcas Buy/Sell/Trade, the only way to trade ferry reservations, the fastest way to get the latest island news, and see events.

This is what we need to provide for ourselves, off of corporate social networks.

Our purpose in this work will be to live better, healthier and more connected lives with stronger relationships to each other.

Our goal will be to remove our dependence on corporate social media.

We will take a community approach by looking at the dependence as a public health problem.

–We will look at the key needs of the community and then provide open source, locally operated solutions. –Then we will partner with key island stakeholders to provide initial content and adoption, creating “life” if you will –We will then create a community onboarding plan, helping different groups onboard each other

A key perspective is that this isn’t a technical solution, it’s one based on community and relationships. Most everyone I speak with acknowledges the problem of corporate social media but doesn’t know what to do, and can’t individually move people there.

An example of a need is an island-wide event calendar, and working with specific groups to use a community-owned standard. About making sure that important places like the school, chamber, etc are putting events in it, giving them access to posting that, and having them point to that calendar. When it’s challenging for a particular stakeholder to do so, provide technical or manual solutions to solving it.

It’s okay if someone has to manually copy a Google calendar to this new system to start. It’s okay to make a specific ask of a specific person to help this initiative. There’s only 7,000 full time residents on the island and maybe 30k in the county. We can work together and help each other get off corporate social media.

It’s fundamental that this isn’t a technology problem, but a community problem, with community solutions. And the end result will be us taking our community’s health into our own hands and providing solutions together.

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.

To reduce world harm, we need to move away from Meta’s suite of social apps. Facebook and Messenger are so integrated into so many people’s lives it almost feels like table stakes for existing in modern society. I quit Twitter before it became X and it was fairly easy. Even then, the idea of fully walking away from Meta seemed daunting so I just minimized my use of it.

Meta seems to hold the keys for the only solutions for key parts of modern society.

Facebook, even if it’s viewed by kids as a boomer thing, is still the number one source for meet ups, the main way to find people you’ve lost contact with, the #1 source of sharing photos. On Orcas it is the main way people buy and sell used items and share news. The majority of Americans above a certain age get their news from Facebook and other social media.

The problem is it’s doing loads of harm. We already know Meta is fueling conspiracy theories, increasing depression, and promoting consumerism. It’s products are shown to increase teen suicide. It’s proven to have fueled genocide in Myanmar. The company is even laying the groundwork to do so again in the United States.

And Meta knows the damage its doing, it’s just not profitable to care.

This is a pattern played out over and over again in an economic growth driven society:

• Tobacco companies knew about the risks of smoking and addiction decades before the public did anything about them
• Oil and gas companies knew about climate change decades before the public
• Insurance companies fully understand the harm being caused by denial of care, even if our political system does nothing about it
• And the social media companies know how harmful their products are today

The common thread between these industries is our growth economy pushes incentives to keep growing, regardless of the external cost to society. It’s actually pretty simple:

The more people who smoke, in spite of the cancer, the bigger the business of William Morris. The fuel Exxon Mobile extracts from the Earth is what fuels both the burning of the Earth as well as the increase in its stock. The more techniques United Health Care has to deny coverage, the greater the executive bonuses, the more health care they deny.

These patterns are all driven from the need to grow economics, without limits as to their effects on people. We can see these linkages happening clearly in the above examples, and social media is exactly the same.

Meta knows all the harm they’re causing, but they continue to do it because of an inherent need to amass more power and wealth regardless of the consequences to humanity. It’s built into the very economic structure of public companies. It’s baked into the valley ethos, myths and religion of silicon valley. Disrupt. Embrace hyper scale. Innnovate. Go viral. Move fast and break the world.

It’s time we move to technologies that are built with different values, ones that serve making a better, more peaceful and equitable society.

The Degrowth movement is based on the simple analysis that the core problems of modern society is that economic growth is driving nearly everything we do. Growth is destroying the Earth, oppressing others, and not making a very particularly great life for most anyone. Even those at the “top of the pyramid” of our society are under a constant pressure for performance because in a growth society, you never have enough.

I used to think that computing was this benign force for the world. That it was inherently more connective, had a lower impact on the environment, and offered humans a great way forward. Instead I’ve seen that it’s rotten to the core, because the fundamental driver of our society is growth.

With PopCap, there was a point where we were making great games that we were proud of, and making millions in profit per year for a small indie studio. There was this constant insecurity; however, and so in order to feel safe we kept growing. The more we grew, the more we felt we had to grow to be safe. That if we just grew 15% more we’d be stable and could breath out.

The problem is our growth society is such that lie is the core of the trap. There’s always the next milestone and “if we just get that next level…” but unfortunately humans aren’t wired that way. We are built with the law of diminishing returns. And this is what’s so insidious in a growth society.

Growth is ostensibly the way we get our basic needs met, experience self acceptance, or receive social validation, but if we can never be fully satisfied, then we’re in a very viscous cycle of insecurity. If everything around us is pushing a culture of growth, this gets worse. How many people do you know who keep accepting promotions and worse work life balance even though they know it will make them more unhappy just so they can grow their finances?

If our answers to our insecurities are growth, but growth is what’s driving the insecurity, then we will just more rapidly destroy the Earth.

And that is what we’re doing.

The software we use everyday is built to exploit those insecurities because the best way to grow in a growth culture is to exploit people’s inherent insecurities. If I want to sell you a beauty product, it’s a lot easier if you feel inadequate.

While this is true across all levels of consumerism, the fact that technology companies are in the middle of many of social and news interactions means it’s made all the worse because we are comparative creatures.

Our insecurities about ourselves, our loved ones, our neighbors, or the world drive more clicks, thus the software we use amplifies those insecurities.

We don’t have to use services that increase teen suicide, or funnel multiple genocides, or data-groom children into meat puppets for advertising to share photos, or see updates from friends. We don’t have to be left feeling worse about ourselves and the world every time we try and connect online.

In order to do so we have move beyond growth as the main driver of technology. We need to slow technology down so that we didn’t measure the success of social media based on engagement or ad dollars, but instead usefulness, connection, or empathy.

When I was a kid technology was new, cool and exciting. Computers were a tool of the mind, and if you could think of it they could do it. Fairly quickly the internet became a thing, allowing you to connect to millions of people. As computers and the internet became more adopted, they became even more useful, eventually integrating into every facet of our lives.

This computing revolution allowed me to make an early online multiplayer video game called ARC with a friend while in college. From there we worked for Sierra Online in their internet group WON.net, where I made it easier to download customer skins, maps, and mods to games. After that I was part of starting PopCap Games, eventually being part of the creation of games like Bejeweled, Peggle, Zuma, and Plants vs. Zombies. Afterwards I spent years at the bleeding edge of Virtual and Augmented reality.

My whole life has been shaped by computers, to the point where it’s near impossible to imagine my existence otherwise. My life has been very fortunate in that way, allowing me to meet people, visit places, create things and quite frankly, do so many unimaginable things.

The problem is, technology and tools exist within the culture and construct of the society that created them. Our society is organized around economic growth, software exists to serve that purpose. The expression “software will eat the world” is commonly thought to mean that it will integrate into all aspects of our lives, but in reality it just means that computing will just accelerate the destruction of the earth that started over the last hundred years or so. While this will provide immense power and wealth for a few this path will come at ever increasing suffering for the majority of all life.

I propose we start to look critically at the software and services we use. Ask us how they benefit us, how they ourselves and others, and find alternatives so we can avoid a society that burns itself to the ground. Alternatives may be less convenient in the short term, but also less destructive. Driving more adoption and support will make them superior over time. Alternatives need to exist outside of mantra of growth, outside of maximizing shareholder value at all costs.

Most acceptable alternatives exist within open source communities, are built on non-capitalistic principals, with distributed power structures, and based on open standards. Any reasonable alternative will almost always avoid advertising as a business model. Non-open source alternatives will be part of the solutions, but won’t be ran by companies packaging a bunch of disparate tools and fund completely unrelated R&D.

Over the coming week I plan to break down different popular services, provide examples of what the problems are, and then highlight various alternatives. I’ll try and lay out what the trade offs are to the alternatives and hopefully paint a picture of different ways for the software ecosystems to work.

PS: Happy Birthday Matt