Episode: 2900
Title: HPR2900: Better Social Media 01 - Introduction
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2900/hpr2900.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 12:56:54

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This in HPR episode 2,900 and titled MetaSocialMedia near a one-introduction, it is hosted by a huker and in about 12 minutes long and carrying a clean flag.
The summary is, we don't have to use Twitter and Facebook, there are alternatives.
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Hello, this is a huker, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio and another exciting episode, and I'm going to kick off a short little series here.
We've got five shows planned, maybe do one or two more than that, we'll see how it goes, and I'm calling this better social media.
So we're going to talk about some alternatives here.
This all started with Pengwakan, which as you probably know is a event I've been associated with for a long time.
And one of the things I've always loved about Pengwakan is just a variety of different talks that I can take in.
So I can go to a panel on anime and then a very technical discussion on SSH, then go on to hearing a science fiction author read from their work.
It's all good.
One talk I got to at a recent Pengwakan was by a fellow named Ed Platt, who has presented at Pengwakan with some regularity, and usually it is something interesting and usually something related to privacy.
On this occasion, he presented a talk called Redi Centralizing the Web, which impressed me as a basis for doing some investigation and reporting back to Hacker Public Radio.
I contacted Ed to see if he might be interested in doing something himself, and he declined, but he gave me permission to use his material in any way that helped.
So I'm taking his work as kind of a jumping off point, and then going into some detail for the Hacker Public Radio audience on some of these applications that I've been investigating.
So why did Ed call his talk Redi Centralizing the Web?
Well, simply the Web and the Internet generally were fairly decentralized at one time.
Those of us who have been around for a while can remember when you might get on the Internet through a school account or a local ISP via dial-up.
The social media we had then were primarily email and use net news groups, and both of these were inherently decentralized.
There was no central server for email, just protocols that defined how messages would pass from one server to another.
News groups also had different servers that would accept and pass along messages without any central server involved.
And then there was golfer, which few people even remember any longer, which let people find documents on servers, mostly located in various universities.
You may never have heard about it because the web made it completely obsolete.
And the early web was decentralized as well with a variety of servers using a protocol.
You know it as the hypertext transfer protocol, and that's where HTTP comes from, that let anyone log on to a site and download a page.
But in 2019, we face a much different world.
While there is still some variety available for email, it is the case that just two providers have over 50% of the market, those two being Apple and Google.
News net news groups have nearly disappeared, except as a place for sharing binary files.
And a handful of websites, such as Facebook, have locked up so much activity that to many people Facebook is the internet.
And the social media options that most people use are very limited and very centralized.
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, which in fact is owned by Facebook, and Snapchat, which is facing heavy competition from Instagram and Facebook's money.
Snapchat, if it doesn't go under, will probably be bought by one of the big companies like Amazon in the next year or so.
So what was a very decentralized cyberspace at one time is becoming highly centralized and controlled by a small number of corporations.
In fact, Amy Webb just released a book called The Big Nine, and there'll be a link in the show notes if you want to get a copy that says it is just six companies in the United States and three in China that control most of the internet.
And the US company, she calls the G Mafia, that's Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, IBM, and Amazon.
And the Chinese companies are bat, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.
Now in the face of this oligopoly control, what can users do to regain control of their online lives and maybe have just a little privacy?
And that is where Ed's talk went. He pointed out that there are options that are decentralized that we can try to use.
That is not to say there aren't trade-offs involved. I personally am not a model of purity since I use Facebook pretty heavily for a couple of reasons.
First, well that's where all my family and friends are located, and most of the groups I belong to are there as well.
And second, I am doing publicity on Facebook for a group that I am committed to.
Facebook has a big advantage in its ubiquity, and you cannot deny that.
Still, I do have friends that I don't find on Facebook. Until recently I would find them on Google+.
But that was recently closed down, and that occasioned a lot of discussion about where to go next.
So for all these reasons, it seemed like a good time to take a closer look at the options.
Note that just how much each of them protects your privacy can vary as is the degree of decentralization.
So I will try to cover the pertinent points for each of the apps that I investigate in detail.
But note that I have no intention of covering all of these apps.
I am giving you a somewhat fuller list. This is for your edification, if you wish to investigate some of your options.
And I am sure if you want to do a show about one of the ones that I don't do, or even an alternative look at one of the ones that I do cover,
Ken would be more than happy to receive your show.
So with all of that, what are the applications that I've pulled together?
And I will have links to all of these in the show notes.
The first one is an application called MeWeak, and they advertise themselves as like Facebook, but with privacy.
Sounds promising. Then there's one called LO, E-L-L-O, and that is the creator's network, a global community of artists dedicated to creative excellence, built by artists for artists.
That might be attractive to some people.
Diaspora. Decentralization is the biggest selling point of diaspora. It is a federation of servers where anyone can set up a server, and others can join.
Pluspora. As you might think from the name, this is related to diaspora. In fact, it is an instance of diaspora that is built.
I guess to resemble Google Plus, although it looks a lot like diaspora to me, which I guess it should.
BitChute. This is a decentralized alternative to YouTube.
A mastodon. This is a federated alternative to Twitter, where instead of tweets, you write toots.
Textile. Textile is an open source and privacy-respecting alternative to sharing photos on Facebook.
PixelFed is kind of a federated alternative to Instagram. It's pretty new. Looks interesting.
Wire. An open source encrypted messaging app that lets you sign up with just a username, no phone number needed.
Signal. An open source encrypted messaging app that is better known, but it does require you to let your correspondence have your phone number.
This is a continuation of the StatusNet project. StatusNet was something that was kind of interesting back in the day. It is kind of dropped out of sight.
Now, mastodon is an alternative implementation of GNU social.
ScuddleButt. This is a peer-to-peer network that also works offline.
MediaGoblin is a free software media publishing platform that anyone can run. You can think of it as a decentralized alternative to Flickr, YouTube, SoundCloud, etc.
And it is also decentralized.
And finally, Freenet. Freenet is free software which lets you anonymously share files, browse and publish free sites, those are websites that are accessible only through Freenet, and chat on forums without fear of censorship.
Freenet is decentralized to make it less vulnerable to attack, and if used in darknet mode, where users only connect to their friends, is very difficult to detect.
So, this is quite a list of applications. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a look in detail at least four of them that I decided to create an account and use long enough to have a sense of
how they work, and then I'm going to tell you about each of those and where I finally wound up with all of this.
Now, every app has strengths and weaknesses, and you wouldn't call any of them a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are some options here.
And I think they're worth taking a look at, so we're going to have a little bit of fun looking at these things.
So, this is Ahuka for HackerPublicRadio signing off, and is always urging you to support free software. Bye-bye!
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