Lately, I’ve written a lot
about the alternative media purge and
how Big Tech social media platforms are attempting to control the
narrative, the elections, and public perception through
censorship and financial blacklisting. Lots of people are ready to leave
websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for less-censored pastures. But
what are the social media alternatives that are currently available?
Here are some social media
alternatives to check out.
Before
we get into the alternatives, please understand that all of them will start
small. None of them will be able to take on Big Tech without a lot of help and
support. We’ve gotten used to free social media because the companies with whom
we’ve dealt have virtually raped us, reading our so-called “private” messages,
and pillaging our date to sell to the highest bidders. So really, it isn’t that
free after all.
You
probably won’t find your parents, your best friend from kindergarten, and your
Aunt Suzie on these platforms – not yet, anyway. But what you WILL be able to
do is speak without fear of censorship. You’ll be able to find your favorite
alternative media sources there and find answers that simply aren’t supported
by the mainstream.
The only way to change this
dystopian atmosphere is to actually make changes ourselves. Go where the
freedom is!
MeWe calls themselves The
Next-Gen Social Network. They raised $4.8 million and launched back in 2016 to
take on Facebook and Twitter. They’re about 6 million members strong so far and
Mark Weinstein, the founder, plans for it to be 500 million by 2022.
“In
the future, MeWe will also revolutionize social media with
decentralization, which will render Facebook’s spying and tracking data model
completely obsolete,” Weinstein added, a comment that suggests he is
indeed trying to replace Facebook. “Awareness around the world has never been
higher regarding news feed manipulation and privacy infractions. Government
regulations will never truly interfere with Facebook’s data collection model,
evidenced in both California’s new 2020 privacy rules and Europe’s GDPR. But the free market can — and
MeWe is here giving people great communication technology in a true
multi-feature platform, with none of Facebook’s BS.” (source)
Gab.ai is a platform that is
similar to Twitter. You have 300 characters with which to make your point. It
has been called the Alt-Right’s social media alternative and although Gab
itself doesn’t censor its users, Microsoft has threatened to take
them down due to “hate speech.” A lot of folks who got banned, shadowbanned, or censored
by Twitter are there.
Gab
founder Andrew Torba feels that they aren’t being portrayed honestly in the
media.
We survived a relentless and
coordinated smear campaign by the dishonest mainstream media without any
outside funding from advertisers or venture capitalists. Our community will
continue to thrive and grow thanks to individuals from around the world who
believe in putting people and free speech above politically correct corporate
agendas.
Gab
has always and will always be powered by you, The People. Gab is not just a social network, it’s a social movement. (source)
With
any social network, what you see in your feed will depend on who your friends
are and who you follow.
You can join Gab
here.
Real.Video
was started by Mike Adams of Natural News in response to mass deplatforming on
YouTube.
This
is the YouTube alternative to give voices and free speech to those who are being
systematically targeted and censored by YouTube, Facebook, Google, and Twitter
for essentially being a pro-Liberty person, standing up for America,
standing up for the Bill of Rights or just basic human rights for that matter.
(source)
Adams would know about
censorship firsthand, since last year, Google delisted his site, Natural
News, from its search engine results.
Real.Video is in the process
of changing its name to Brighteon.com and
hosts numerous videos that were banned by Twitter. It’s still in the
developmental stages, so there’s an occasional glitch but thus far it has been
a relatively smooth user experience.
Another
budding network is Mastodon, which has the tagline “Giving social media back to
you.” It’s a free, open-source network, which means that developers can
contribute to it because its design is publicly accessible.
Ultimately
Mastodon is a decentralized alternative to all the commercial social network
platforms, which means that no single company owns it or can monopolize your
communication. (source)
I
found it confusing to use (maybe you need to be more techy?) and was put off by
the fact that I needed to log in via Twitter. Perhaps this is just so you can
connect with the same people. It’s always worthwhile to look at your options.
Mastodon was started by Eugen Rochko, who was fed up with the changes that
Twitter was making that closely resembled the Facebook algorithms.
Last
year, after Twitter began moving away from a purely chronological feed,
Rochko began building the back end for what would become Mastodon. Instead of
building a unified service, Rochko envisioned something more like email, or
RSS: a distributed system that lets you send public messages to anyone who
follows you on the service. Anyone can create a server and host their
own instance of Mastodon, and Mastodon works in the background to
connect them. (source)
Here’s a beginner’s guide to using Mastodon,
and here’s where you can join.
If
you can figure this out, maybe you can explain it to me?
Diaspora is a social network
built on three cornerstones: decentralization, freedom, and privacy. To join
Diaspora, you have to choose a “pod” which is a group of potentially
like-minded people. Each pod is independently hosted which should lessen the
likelihood of corporate censorship.
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You
can follow hashtags that interest you, and you can categorize people by how you
know them (family, friends, work, etc.) Then you can control who sees the
different things that you post.
Diaspora is decentralized
which means no one person owns it. This means that it doesn’t have any form of
advertisement and corporate interference. It also does not collect any of your
data. When you create your account, you are responsible for your own data and
retain the ownership of your personal data.
Unlike
Facebook, Diaspora allows you to use whatever identity you want, so pseudonyms
and nicknames are fine to display as your profile. (source)
Or you can join an old-fashioned forum.
I know that personally, I’m
not too jazzed about the learning curve of some of these new options and prefer
the more familiar layouts of Real.Video (Brighteon), MeWe, and Gab. But
honestly, people on social media can just be so horrible that Selco Begovic and I started an old-fashioned forum that
is a throw-back to the 90s/early 2000s. I like forums because they’re familiar,
comfortable, and they draw likeminded people together.
While
there are tens of thousands of forums out there, if you are interested in
freedom, self-reliance, and survival, I hope you’ll join ours. For privacy
reasons, we ask you NOT to use your real name anywhere on the registration
form. All we need is a real email address to send you password updates, etc.
Go here to join The Survival & Self-Reliance Forum with
Selco and Daisy.
There are social media options.
Humans
are social creatures. No matter how introverted we might be, we all seek
connections with others. These days a lot of those connections are online.
Thanks to the internet, it’s never been easier to find like-minded people. I
personally have friends from around the world who I met online that I never
would have crossed paths with otherwise.
Big
Tech companies like Facebook and Twitter have taken advantage of our desire to
do this. They “hooked” people then they manipulated what the users would see
with algorithms. They collected every word you ever typed on social media and
made assessments about you so they could sell that information to advertisers.
They made a fortune off of every person who ever used their services, and deep
down in the fine print, people gave them permission to do so.
Now
they’re trying to control the narrative by removing people who dissent against
things like war, police brutality, and corrupt politicians.
If
you’re looking for an alternative social media outlet, check out some of the
options above. They won’t be able to take on Big Tech without us.
Reprinted with permission
from The
Organic Prepper.
Daisy
Luther [send
her mail] is a freelance writer and editor. Her website, The Organic
Prepper, offers information on healthy prepping, including premium
nutritional choices, general wellness and non-tech solutions. You can follow
Daisy on Facebook and Twitter.
Copyright
© 2018 The Organic Prepper