Resources for Resistance No. 7
A roundup of social media alternatives
It’s time for the exodus from Meta.
I had no sooner posted to Instagram about an interaction on Facebook’s “Dad Jokes” group than I began to see news that the Meta was pulling fact–checking.
First to the interaction on what has been up to now a pretty innocuous page. Spying Having an offensive post thrust in my face, I tried to throw down some big knowledge from Scientific American about sex.
My comment was automatically (auto-Meta-ickly) declined. This probably occurred via AI, which, parenthetically, is accelerating climate change. Before I resumed teaching college, I spent fifteen years in high tech. I am unafraid of technology and more than willing to share a perspective on it with a wider audience. I designed and taught two sections of a first year seminar I called “Internet, Society, and Everyday Life.”
Meta announcement
On December 7, the Oligarch What–The–Zuckerberg announced, explicitly in view of the impending Occupation of the Oval Office, that Meta would end human fact–checking on Meta in the interests of free speech turning Meta into dipXitter.
Here’s the reaction from one of the fact–checkers, Politifact, which over the past year I have found fairly generous towards the GOP regime and stingy toward centrists.
Off and on over the years I have explored Facebook alternatives like MeWe precisely because of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. But with the fall of Twitter to the Oligarch Elon Musk, aka “Scrappy Do,” I began to experiment with platforms like Mastodon. Here are the social media alternatives I find promising.
Spoutible
I want to elevate Spoutible first because it was recommended to me by
, whom I’ve known for many years. Chris Bouzy, the platform’s CEO, is a black entrepreneur who got his start coding abuse filters for Twitter. You can read his story in this fine, not–too–techie story on Wired.Bouzy is the 48-year-old CEO of Bot Sentinel, an automated service that ascertains whether Twitter accounts are part of coordinated harassment or disinformation campaigns. He was frequently quoted in the media on the subject of online misbehavior; most recently, he’d appeared as an expert in Netflix’s documentary series on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. More than that, Bouzy was a fiendishly entertaining tweeter: a relentlessly online figure who’d attracted more than 380,000 followers with election forecasts and acerbic posts on misinformation and right-wing extremism. To his devotees, many of whom are active in the realms of Black Twitter and Progressive Twitter, he was something of a mirror-world Elon Musk—another tech obsessive beloved for dishing out verbal jabs in defense of his principles.
Yet quite unlike Musk, who has reveled in letting Twitter go largely unmoderated, Bouzy said his goal was to run a platform that would proudly identify as a safe space. He planned to weave Bot Sentinel’s technology right into its infrastructure so that each account could be assigned a score based on its 400 most recent posts—the higher the score, the more likely a person is to be a bad-faith actor. Users could then filter out interactions from everyone whose score registered above a certain threshold or just block accounts flagged as suspicious on a case-by-case basis. Bouzy also aimed to create a responsive moderation system that would aggressively stamp out accounts that spewed hateful rhetoric or lies. “You will never have to beg us to enforce our rules and policies,” he promised, “nor will you have to wait days for us to take action.” Thanks to these safeguards, Bouzy asserted, his platform would be free from the poisonous influence of the internet’s vilest characters—the Nazis, misogynists, and nihilists who delight in filling reply sections with bile.
Here’s a year–old comparison of Spoutible with dipXitter and its alternatives.
Podcasts and Cross–Platform posting (to Mastodon and BlueSky) are two unique features of Spoutible, as is the wordcloud of recent posts. It’s Bouzy’s “Morning Commute” pod to which I turned the two mornings following the 2024 election.
BlueSky
A great many Left outlets, celebrities, and established media organizations finally left dipXitter for BlueSky when the Oligarch Elon Musk started campaigning for and with Donold Trump. As such it’s fairly hospitable, despite the lack of BotSentinel. It’s a very useable platform, and Substack maintains a share button for it.
MeWe
Of the several Facebook alternatives I have tried, WT.Social, Vero, and MeWe, the last of these seemed the most promising. WT.Social (now Trust Cafe) shares the complexity of federation with Mastodon. Vero is elegantly designed, but with a minimalist interface and functionality. It requires an app, and cannot be used with a browser. While robust in functionality, MeWe seems to have been colonized by the right wing, particularly because it lacked content moderation, at the time this was being implemented on Facebook.
Substack
Before turning to blogging here, I used Tumblr (Dr. Who’s Reading Room, The Structure Whisperer) and most extensively, Wordpress (The Considered Kula, Dance Like Fire, Wholehearted Yoga, and The Cyber Tribe). I do like the flexibility afforded by Wordpress, but found it too “infinitely revisable” and therefore lacking structure. Moreover, it was difficult to “monetize.” Goodness I hate that word. William Safire notwithstanding, I don’t think it’s possible to “verb” anything.
I think it was
who got me thinking more about Substack. Think, I did because my sleuthing found some discontent with the platform’s apparent willingness to monetize Neo–Nazi content. Indeed, over this issue, the tech newsletter Platformer left Substack, to go over to the open source platform Ghost. I did look into Ghost, but a little guy like me does not have the bandwidth to find hosting for an open source app.As I dipped my toe into Substack, however, I enjoyed using the app to consume content. When I first set up this blog and began to publish, I liked that it achieved balance between flexibility, ease of use, and structure to remove some of the obstacles from actually writing and publishing. It also seemed easy to monetize. Here, in no particular order, is a nonexhaustive list some of the blogs I read reasonably regularly.
I know
by reputation from other social media, and my colleague writes enviably frequently about topics similar to mine over at . To me this is a large enough list of edifying community to be able to ignore the Neo–Nazis, and “UNO reverse ‘flood the zone’” with some wholesome content.Signal
I never had occasion to use WhatsApp much before this summer, when I wanted to be in contact with a friend traveling abroad. I detest using Facebook Messenger because I don’t want Meta to have my messages, and this extends to WhatsApp, despite the promises of end–to–end encryption. I’d much prefer to use Apple’s Messages, because it’s natively cross–platform, and secure. Messages is end–to–end encrypted for Apple uses, and the company refused to give backdoor access to the FBI. In iOS 18, Apple also began to offer more robust interoperability with RCS than dumbed down SMS.
If “it” gets real and the feds start to police protest, or authorities seek to leverage private information, we’re going to have to turn to Signal for secure communication across platforms. I used this to be in touch with organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest at the airport in Bangor, ME, when the Mango Mussolini came to town. It’s not a bad idea to download it and become familiar with its use.
Taking Your Ball and Going Home
Before I killed my dipXitter accounts, I created archives of my tweets. I managed to import some of my writing from Dance Like Fire into this blog. I know if I ever felt the need to leave Substack, I could download my posts, and in any case, they’ve gone in e–mail to my subscribers. BlueSky offers the ability to move one’s content to another host—the code is portable. Its funding also makes it less vulnerable to takeover by an oligarch like Scrappy Do. I think such considerations are important in an era of likely uncertainty. What times in which we live, that an oxymoron like “likely uncertainty” makes sense.
What’s Ahead
Preparedness for greater repression from The Turd Reich may mean a communication shutdown such as occurred in Egypt during the Arab Spring. Understand this had two outcomes we may understand “provisionally,” which is to say in the spirit of this blog. First, shutting off the Internet and SMS forced people into the streets, which is to say Tahrir Square. Second, people began to hack public utility poles to power their devices, and to create peer–to–peer networks to make an end run around the lack of centralized communication. We need to have these skills in the movements of resistance.
Conclusion
For now you will still see me sharing a great deal on Instagram, and connecting with friends and family on Facebook. I’m disappointed with Instagram also for the geeky reason that Meta stripped its APIs (application programming interface) for consumer apps, The uphot of this is that my posts there no longer archive to my DayOne diary app (which works across the Apple platforms I’m on). Occasionally, I’ll dip a toe into Threads, satisfied that cross–posting from Instagram and Facebook does most of what I want there. I’ll continue my long–form writing here. Because of my loyalty to the feature– and content–rich community, I’ll probably post shorter shares to Spoutible, which cross–posts to BlueSky, but I will l likely interact with the growing community on BlueSky, knowing also I can take my marbles and go home.
Thanks for the mention and for the great list of people to check out here! It is truly appreciated
BlueScreen, a video browser for BlueSky, has just become available for general release. https://bsky.app/profile/flashes.blue/post/3lhgmsuzpbk2v