No, It’s Not An Elephant!

I’ve been messing around with Mastodon, the social media site that is part of the fediverse…because GUESS WHAT! I’ve been missing the IRC (Internet Relay Chat) in its original form for many years. And though Mastodon is often compared to twitter, I find it also reminds me of a modern-day IRC. So last week I created an account just so that I could look around, and – as I ALWAYS do when faced with something new – spent way too many hours researching it.

Parenthetically, I have less and less respect or use for Big Tech. They’ve decided that they should choose what content I can see and post, become so politically active that they are purposefully and blatantly tipping the scales of fairness to all candidates and issues, and have made us users their personal wealth-builders. Thankfully, we don’t have to use them.

The alternatives to using these companies and their products isn’t easy or direct, but it’s out there. For example we are in the process – which will take months – of switching all operating systems of all of our devices from Windows and Android. We are de-googling and de-amazoning our lives, which have been heavily dependent for way too long, because it was easier, more convenient, and cheaper. And we are choosing to do business locally with merchants and others who actually are all about their products, and not about swaying their customers politically or ideologically.

And now we come to Mastodon. I’m still learning. But apparently there is this whole open source “fediverse” out there that offers a whole lot of sharing networks but the ones that I am most interested are Mastodon (bye, Facebook! bye Twitter!), Peertube, and Pixelfed (bye, Instagram!). These have been around a long time, this isn’t a new thing by any means, but it’s all new to me, and I’m just learning about it all – FASCINATING!!!

Since I’m hardly an expert, I will share some links below for my own current areas of interest. Meanwhile, I will continue to be on gab.com and USA.Life and plan to stay. I’m self-limiting my use of Facebook and YouTube but not planning on leaving totally at this point. The goal is to learn everything I can about whatever options are out there, then make some decisions.

Of course, the way 2020 is going, the internet could just disappear, right? Nothing would surprise me anymore!

https://joinmastodon.org/ – Follow friends and discover new ones among more than 4.4M people. Publish anything you want: links, pictures, text, video. All on a platform that is community-owned and ad-free

https://pixelfed.org – Pixelfed is an image sharing platform, an ethical alternative to centralized platforms.

https://joinpeertube.org/en – PeerTube, developed by Framasoft, is the free and decentralized alternative to video platforms, providing you over 200,000 videos published by 30,000 users and viewed over 10 million times

https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse – FEDIVERSE is a portmanteau of two words “federation” and “universe” It is a common name for federated social networks running on free open software on a myriad of servers across the world.

Mastodon <- Find me!