by Rusty
NB: This is a cross-post from the Rhizomatix blog, a blog that can be found as a Tor Hidden Service [onion link] as well as a Gopher page [Gopher link]. That’s right — an old school Gopher Page! The post was written by Rusty, and was promoted on scholar.social, an academic-oriented instance of Mastodon, a Twitter alternative. Rusty kindly let me repost it here on the S-MAP. It is part primer to Mastodon, part retrospective on one person’s engagement with that system, and part critique of Mastodon; great material for the S-MAP. Some of it has been edited for clarity.
[Also, let me promote the S-MAP’s extensive collection of Mastodon instance terms of service and sign up screens for study.]
Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. For many folks, these names are synonymous with the internet. For many teenagers and adults, not actively using these big tech platforms would create the eerie sensation that you don’t exist. And that’s a real problem. We invest so much of our identities in platforms that see us as data points to be studied & marketed. The crux here is the user’s lack of control. Popular social media platforms function as “walled gardens,” or restricted zones in which the company controls how the platform functions & all the data is archived on centralized servers.
I won’t rehash the sins of Facebook or Twitter here. That project has already been done by folks smarter than me. Good resources for how walled gardens perennially abuse their users include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, BoingBoing, & Motherboard.
Instead, I explore some newer alternatives to walled gardens. These alternatives center their missions around the issues of data, both who controls it & where it is stored. They also adhere to principles of open-source development, consentful interaction, & data protection. While many alternatives exist, here I want to focus on Mastodon.