Episode: 2920
Title: HPR2920: Better Social Media 03 - MeWe
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2920/hpr2920.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 13:16:30

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This in HPR episode 2,920 entitled Better Social Media Nero Free, MeWee, it is hosted by AYUKA
and in about 12 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, MeWee one advertised another popular alternative to Google Plus.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by archive.org.
Support universal access to all knowledge by heading over to archive.org
forward slash donate.
www.meWeeWee.com
Hello, this is AYUKA, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio
and another exciting episode in my new series on Better Social Media.
And today I want to look at an application called MeWee, MeWee.
MeWee is the other platform that ended up posting a large number of Google Plus refugees.
It has some very good features and also some differences with alternatives like diaspora.
MeWee is not open source or distributed but does have a strong privacy focus.
It's privacy bill of rights states.
You own your personal information and content, it is explicitly not ours.
You will never receive a targeted advertisement or third party content based on what you do or say online.
We think that's creepy.
You see every post in timeline order from your friends, family, and groups.
We do not manipulate, filter, or change the order of your content or what you see.
I particularly like that one, I hate what Facebook does.
Permissions and privacy are your rights, you control them.
You control who can access your content.
You control what, if anything, others can see in member searches.
Your privacy means we do not share your personal information with anyone.
Your emojis are for you and your friends.
We do not monitor or mine your data.
Your face is your business, we do not use facial recognition technology.
And finally you have the right to delete your account and take your content with you at any time.
Well, I think this is good enough to at least make it worth a look.
So I was happy to give this a try.
They also prominently display the claim on their homepage that says they have no ads,
no spyware, and no BS.
Now, on the other hand, they do not hide that this is a company doing this rather than a community
project like diaspora. So how do they make money?
Well, they say they do it by offering extras you pay for,
and by offering a pro version for businesses that is not free of charge.
It costs $75 per month per employee, but is free for nonprofits and educational institutions.
The MeWe Pro application offers additional collaboration tools and might be worth a look for some companies.
As for individuals, you get 8 gigabytes of storage free with your account.
But to get 50 gigabytes, you have to pay $4.99 per month.
If you're using MeWe to share photos, now that'll eat up 8 gigabytes at some point,
depending on how many photos you want to upload and share.
They also offer secret chat, which they describe as something like WhatsApp without the tracking.
And that costs $0.99 per month.
And they also offer unlimited voice and video calling for $1.99 per month.
Then there are custom emojis at $0.99 a packet,
and they offer pages for $2.99 per month, which would probably appeal mostly to organizations
or more prominent or famous people. At least that is what I've found so far.
You can find many of these at the MeWe store, and that link will be in the show notes along with
the link to MeWe in general. You may not be thrilled at the way they sell you this stuff,
but there's only so many ways to support a social media service.
If a company is going to provide such a service, they have to get a revenue stream.
Facebook does it by selling your data. MeWe does it by selling extras.
Personally, I'm okay with that. I don't object to a company making money.
So what is the MeWe experience like? Well, MeWe resembles Facebook in a lot of ways.
It is a slicker interface than diaspora, but for a profit-making company that should not be a surprise.
On the left is a column where you can browse groups to join, and under that is a list of your friends
called MyContacts, and you can start a chat with any of them just like you do on Facebook.
The chat window then pops open and the lower right just as it does on Facebook.
Then in the central column, again, just like Facebook, that's your stream.
Everything you post and anything that has been shared with you appears here in the central column.
And MeWe promises it will show you everything in strict chronological order, which is a big
difference from Facebook, as is the fact that no ads or promoted posts appear.
And there is no boosting. If you have been as annoyed as I have been with what Facebook does,
you will like this way of handling your stream.
Now, I would advise using hashtags on your posts to make them easier to manage,
and to attract the audience that is interested in that particular topic.
When you make a new post, the default is to make it visible to your contacts,
but there is a drop down to change that to public.
Since the way I use social media is to make most things public, I kept looking for a setting
somewhere to make public the default, but never found it. So I would manually change each
poll post, which was annoying, until one day I was doing this and got a pop-up message asking
if I wanted to make public the default. I said yes, and it's worked fine ever since.
I would have thought there might be something in the settings menu for this, but if there is, I missed it.
Now, photo sharing is not too difficult. You start by making a post and click the photo button to
add a photo from your hard drive. When you do this, it will give you an opportunity to add this photo
to an album, which you name, and then add more photos to the post and to the album. This all works
pretty well, but as I said before, you only get 8GB of storage in a free account.
So I would say this is good for sharing photos, but not for mass storage.
Remember that an extra 50GB is $4.99 per month, which may not be huge, but ends up being more
than many of the alternatives. You can also access your photos or work with them by going to the
upper right where your picture will show up if you use the picture on your profile. Click on that
and select my cloud. You can also use this for file storage, but again, watch your storage use.
Fortunately, on the left of this screen, you can easily see how much storage you have used
and how much you have in total. On the right is the window where you can post what you're
listening to, eating, watching, etc. Under that is a window where you'll be notified if there are
unread posts from a group you have joined, and under that is the photo stream, which will show
your photos and also photos that have been shared with you. Now settings, right under the
my cloud in that dropdown is settings, and here is where you can go to make your privacy settings,
such as whether others can download the photos you're post. I set mine to not allow this.
There are settings you can make for notifications for how your feed is presented.
I always go for the newest on top and for group preferences.
Now, many people came to me because Google Plus was shutting down, and me we responded to this
by making it easy to upload your Google Plus content to me. The last option in the settings
menu would let you upload your Google Plus data if you had the foresight to download it all before
Google Plus shut down. Personally, I regard most social media posts as ephemera and did not do
this, but I appreciate that me we made this easy for those who value this. My point of view has always
been if it's something that you want to refer to again and you want to make permanent,
that's what a website is for, and so that's what I do. Now, the me we community is based on something
called my contacts, and I have not yet seen any posts from anyone who is not already one of my
contacts. Now, this is very good for some purposes. For instance, if you wanted to set up a family
group or affinity group where only members would ever see the posts, this would be excellent.
If you want to see more posts from people you might share an interest with, you need to join a group.
There are groups for things like music, travel, foodies, and so on. Go to the top menu bar,
click on groups, and then browse the open groups. Now, an open group is defined as group,
which is open to anyone to join. Adult content is a different matter.
And add one that appeals to you. Some groups you can just join with a click,
others ask you to apply. My entirely unscientific survey of the politics activism groups showed a
lean to the right, but there were also things like green party. For organizations you might want to
follow, or some of the more prominent people, try pages. Now, to get started, just go to the me we
homepage, link in the show notes, and enter the requested information to get your accounts started.
I will note here that they ask for either an email address or a mobile telephone number,
which may mean they are using this for two-factor authentication.
I saw a tweet online that said they are working on this, but that it was not done as of that tweet,
which was late in 2018. So, that's something to watch, I suppose. I hope this will help you decide
if me we as for you. It has some attractive features, also some questionable ones, but it is an
option out there if you're looking for alternative social media. And so, with that, this is Ahuka,
for Hacker Public Radio signing off and is always encouraging you to support FreeSoftware. Bye-bye.
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