I've been spending a ~~little time~~ shit-tons of time exploring the social networking alternatives that are currently emerging and the philosophical underpinnings that that back them. As a true believer in the power of open and free software to make the lives of all humans better, I feel like the solution to the problems social networks and social media lay in that realm. It frees us from becoming a monetization stream for the controlling network.

Of the plurality of options at the moment Mastodon is where I keep coming back to for the moment but I've listed the other considerations below with links. It is structured like a decentralized hub and spoke system and federates with most other platforms. Currently, Mastodon instances have taken a topological approach; there is science based instances, art based instances, nsfw (porn) instances, libertarian instances, and so on; each run independently on their own servers. While fragmentation along topological lines is interesting from one perspective, it doesn't mitigate obfuscation, FUD, and fake news stirred up on social networks as a first class citizen. If you are interested in a given topic, you might have to go hunting for the instance and then for it's interesting users/bots. I don't feel like this adds any layers of social security, and still exposes our feeds to outside influencers eventually.

Honestly, there is 0% chance of popular adoption of this generation of decentralized social networks for various reason; we, the technical elite, just haven't got it right and can't sell a convincing arguments why non-technical people would want to adopt the platform.

The solution I've been pondering is the power of locality in social network credibility. I think the next "FB killer" will build our feeds based geographical queries that lend importance to the social bonds of proximity. How can a Russian troll influence your feed when there is no entry point for their bullshit because the algorithm is weighted to the importance of your real world location , an obvious primary connection to people.

I'm going to devote some greater thought to this idea, and see where it takes me.

#Geographical Social Media ... #geosocial.me maybe?

Other participants in the Fediverse:

• Hubzilla
• Friendica
• Mastodon
• GNU Social
• Fuck it, I was intending to make a list but fediverse.party already does it better. Check them out there.