As Xitter continues to plumb the depths of free speech absolutism, empowering, enriching and emboldening far-right views, many people are starting to question whether the dominant forms of social media are appropriate for them or the organisations they work for.
Afallen has long been a pioneer of open source technologies, and we are proud to have been active participants in Mastodon since 2019. We believe that open source social media platforms like Mastodon offer a more socially just, hate-free way of communicating and organising.
We are delighted to offer a new training course; “Mastodon for Organisations”. Aimed at communication professionals or others who currently use social media within their working day, this 1-hour session will take you from ‘zero to hero’, and give you strategic insights into why and how you should use Mastodon.
Our trainer for this programme is David Clubb, a pioneer in the practical application of open source solutions within organisations. He has developed and delivered digital strategies, and is an experienced trainer online. His personal experience with Mastodon stretches back to 2018; there are few people better placed to support your organisation in this brave and open new digital world.
Open source social media is well-aligned with Wales’ Future Generations Goals and values. By joining Mastodon and the Fediverse, your organisation will be taking steps to a kinder, better-connected and more understanding world.
Facebook allows lies to spread virtually unchecked. It permits those people with the most money and least scruples to disseminate falsehoods to those most susceptible. And it allows this with no prospect of holding individuals or organisations to account.
Whilst Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms have enabled a blossoming of connection, conversation and shared ideas; they have also created a bitter, divisive, polarised digital world where shareholder value is enhanced most by highlighting division and minimising harmony. Quiet, reasoned thoughts are filtered out by algorithms designed to maximise clicks, retweets and likes. Volume is king.
Many people want to make a difference but they don’t know how. But there is an antidote to the virus of misinformation and hatred. That antidote is open source social media, and it’s already spreading at the fringes of the online universe.
Open source social media
Open source social media doesn’t permit advertising. It doesn’t sell data. It prohibits hate speech and intolerance*. And it’s moderated by users, not resourced at the behest of global tech giants.
More worryingly for the incumbents, the hotbeds of innovation are no longer in the mega-corporations with their teams of thousands in the offices and boardrooms of (mostly) America. They are in the open source equivalents, with code freely available for thousands of supporters and volunteers across the globe to build and improve.
From the perspective of Wales’ Future Generations Act, anybody using, promoting or supporting these open source platforms is supporting the goal of a Globally Responsible Wales. From a worldwide perspective, that same user or supporter is increasing the freely-accessible sum of human knowledge.
One clear example of this innovation is the federation between open source platforms (also known as the Fediverse). Federation is the ability to connect different social media platforms, so that posts and updates become mutually visible.
This means that if you post a photo on Pixelfed (ethical version of Instagram), it pops up in your feed on Mastodon (ethical version of Twitter). Likewise websites, blogs and updates on the ethical equivalent of pretty much every ‘surveillance capitalism’ platform you can think of can cross-post to each other, enabling much more streamlined conversations and updates.
What are the downsides (and upsides)?
Let’s deal with the elephant in the room; the big downside of the new open source Fediverse is that user numbers are far, far lower than for the established platforms.
This is hardly surprising; there’s a headstart of fifteen years or so for many of the tech giants. And the science behind social media means that there’s an agglomeration effect; once most of your friends are engaged on a platform, it takes a significant effort to leave them behind and start something new.
For me personally it meant (mostly) leaving my Twitter account of several thousand followers, and starting a fresh new Mastodon account on toot.wales, one of many ‘locality’ type instances across the world.
I instantly ‘lost out’ on the instantaneous stream of updates from my many friends and colleagues, and on the rough-and-tumble of (what passes for) debate there. There’s likely an impact on my ability to promote my new business, Afallen, through that network, too.
However, what I have found is a new community of online friends and collaborators. I’ve witnessed almost zero hatred or bullying. And I’ve relished using platforms which don’t harvest my personal data in order to sell them to companies who may – in many cases – place profit above the public good.
The truth is that the community of users in Mastodon (and the other platforms) is growing steadily – see the example below for activity on toot.wales. At some tipping point – I’m convinced – the growth will start to become exponential, and then the users who became active first will see the biggest benefits.
Weekly interactions on the toot.wales platform
But the biggest benefit of all will come when people start to leave the platforms of the tech giants en masse, lessening their influence as the custodians of online debate and information-sharing, and contributing to a kinder, gentler and more thoughtful world of public discourse.
Further information
If you’re interested in finding out more about the ethical, privacy-conscious alternatives to the mainstream social media platforms, head to switching.software.
*Almost all ‘instances’ of open source social media ban hate and intolerance. Those that don’t are generally blocked, so the hatred is restricted to a small portion of the Fediverse
One response to “Open source social media will save our democracy”
I first started to develop the Afallen website in October 2018, as we were starting to move from the concept of our Partnership, to the reality of communicating our ideas to the world.
In 2018 the options for creating elegant websites were somewhat fewer than today. The basic wordpress functionality made it difficult to produce bespoke aspects of design, so we opted to use a commercial theme.
Fast-forward to 2020, and a number of things have changed, in the world of web design, but also more widely in our understanding of issues surrounding surveillance capitalism and privacy.
The new WordPress content management system – Gutenberg – has certainly not been without its critics; but the latest iteration allows for custom design and drag’n’drop type functionality, in a way which allows us to mirror the design of our previous website, but with a much lower code-base.
Our old website; 14 months of trusty representation
Privacy, surveillance and a ‘free’ web
In the 18 months since our first website was launched, we’ve become much more aware of data-mining, and the extent to which large corporations collect (and use) data on us as individuals.
This information can be used in unscrupulous ways to micro-target individuals, in some cases with misinformation in order to try to solicit actions such as voting for a particular outcome or candidate.
By using something as innocuous-seeming as Google Analytics, organisations are helping to maintain and strengthen the ability of private organisations to influence and direct our public discourse – and even our voting intentions.
That’s why you won’t find any tracking code on our website. In truth we never changed what we were doing based on our analytics anyway, so there will be zero impact on our operations. But there will be a minuscule reduction in the amount of data that Google – and others – are able to collect, as a result of your visit here today.
This article in The Atlantic magazine describes the worrying trend of using harvested data to try to spread misinformation in the United States; it’s a trend that we also see in the UK.
Accessibility
There are two other important improvements that arise from our change of theme.
Firstly, our website is now more accessible. Whilst not being perfect, it is much easier to navigate and read, because we’ve dispensed with a bunch of code that was necessary to create and place the elements that made up our previous website.
The other advantage is that the website is now able to automatically output new blog posts to the Fediverse, via the Activitypub plugin.
In other words, each of our posts will find its way to a (potentially) global audience via Mastodon and other federated networks – which will help us to reach, and influence, people everywhere.
So – a very warm welcome to our new website. And if you want to find out more about why we do the things we do, take a look at our values, or meet us over a coffee to talk about how we can help you in implementing sustainability and well-being. Privacy included as standard.
Social media has energised the way in which we interact, communicate, promote and understand. As with any tool, it has the ability to be used for good, or for ill.
I don’t intend here to detail the way that social media is used to abuse, to pillory, to demean and to spread hate. Nor is this a treatise about whether it’s democratically healthy for social media to be used by political parties or corporate entities to micro-target individuals or small communities with messages which may only be loosely based on fact, or indeed a complete fiction.
Instead, I want you to take a moment to imagine participating in a social network free from hate; one which doesn’t answer to shareholders; and where paid advertising directed by surveillance capitalism is not possible.
Now I want you to take a step further; I want you to imagine that same network, where you can share a picture (same way as Instagram); share a blog post (same way as Medium); share a micro-blog (same as Twitter); share a video (such as with YouTube) – and all the content from all those different platforms is brought to you in one place.
Hang onto your hats – it’s already here!
Unbeknown to most internet users, there’s a quiet revolution taking place on the fringes of the social web which merits close examination.
Fed up with pleading to Twitter, Facebook, Google and other internet giants to take action on abuse and to act on genuine privacy concerns, the open source community has created solutions which herald the dawning of a new era of accountable social media.
And Wales could be at the vanguard of this revolution, thanks partly to some imagination and drive from a boy from Barry who made it in New York, Jaz-Michael King.
The Fediverse
Before diving into how to join the revolution, it’s worth talking about how the Federated Universe (Fediverse) operates.
Unlike the existing social media monopolies, the Fediverse has no central company controlling the flow of content, and deciding what to permit or ban.
Instead, there’s a plethora of small sites – ‘Instances’ – which operate semi-autonomously from one another, but which are linked (federated) so that content can be viewed simultaneously on all federated platforms. Authors retain ownership and control of their content, while citizens can pick and choose the content and people they wish to connect with, free from profit-driven algorithms and their associated echo chambers.
So somebody posting a photo on Pixelfed (a federated photo-sharing site, which looks and feels just like Instagram) will instantly share that image with all their followers, on whatever ‘Instance’ they’re based.
Likewise, someone posting a micro-blog on a federated account (such as Mastodon) will share that post with all their followers across all whole ‘Fediverse’.
No more hate?
Whilst it would be a stretch to say that hate has no place within the Fediverse, it’s certainly no exaggeration to say that it is a far more pleasant place than most conventional social networks.
That’s because most Instances have rules which forbid unpleasant behaviour. The decision about what constitutes acceptable behaviour is up to the administrators or the community of that individual Instance, but if unpleasant behaviour consistently appears unchallenged on a specific Instance, it’s possible that all other Instances could sever ties, effectively inoculating the rest of the Fediverse from the content that’s being posted in the ‘bad’ Instance.
Indeed this has already happened in July this year, where an Instance supporting far-right speech was de-federated by many other instances, significantly limiting its ability to interact with the rest of the Fediverse. The success and growth of the Federation as a movement has been significantly driven by the growing dissatisfaction and loss of trust that the international corporate networks cannot (or will not) manage, and that smaller, locally-driven communities are more able to effectively self-manage.
Wales leading?
So – how could Wales be leading the charge?
Enter Toot.Wales, the brainchild of émigré Jaz-Michael King. Toot.Wales is Wales’ own instance of the micro-blogging site Mastodon. Fully bilingual by default, it is also on the verge of deploying its first mobile app for Android (with ios development underway).
Toot is also the host for Wales’ own answer to Instagram, via Pix.Toot.Wales, and for a ‘lite’ blogging experience via Blogs.Toot.Wales.
I often see people on Twitter complaining about certain functionalities not being available, including the most basic need for a Welsh language interface; about tools to control or limit abuse, about access to one’s own data and the right to delete it or download it.
My response is: leave the network. The influence we have with the owners of Twitter, Facebook or any other mainstream social media platform is vanishingly small. If complaints by users have implications on profit, they are unlikely to become a corporate priority. Regulation is possible, but is cumbersome, hard to enforce and likely to date quickly.
So we must vote with our feet. We have within our own hands, literally and metaphorically, the means to turn our backs on networks which value profit over privacy, and to champion an open source ethical alternative.
I believe that Wales can demonstrate to the rest of the world that it’s possible to take a stance on this issue. Already facing a crisis in media, we should no longer submit to the whims of global corporate giants. With so much of the information we receive being more or less completely out of the control of the people of Wales, this is one area where we genuinely can, and we should, be taking back control.
One response to “Open source social media will save our democracy”
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