Author of Be Ready for Anything and Bloom Where You’re Planted online course
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
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)
Go here to get a MeWe account.
Gab.ai
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 (Brighteon)
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.
Check out Real.Video/Brighteon here.
Mastodon
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
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.
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)
Go here to find yourself a pod on Diaspora.
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.
Do you use any alternative social media?
Did I leave out any alternative social media options that you’re enjoying right now? If so, please share them in the comments section below.
Good post for those who don’t have their finger on the pulse of technology.
I think one aspect worth discussing is the voluntary removal of most social media in general. Other than keeping an eye on what everyone else is doing – choosing not to communicate using any technology platform. I do like the forums concept too. Like-minded people in niche communities are a good thing and often more gets accomplished. Who knows anymore these days.
Face to face is still our preference.
I use Minds at https://www.minds.com/.
Another open source decentralized platform.
“Real.Video is in the process of changing its name to Brighteon.com”
DONT
real.video is a simple URL that anyone can remember. some marketing weenie is going to screw this up for them.
I’d guess that they are doing so to avoid legal trouble with RealMedia (anyone remember Real Player from the early days of the web?).
What ever happened to the promises of life.is?
I use MeWe, started a metalworking hobbyist group there a couple of years ago. I’ve never had a Twitter or Instagram account, opened a Facebook account to keep track of a few relatives, but deleted it a year later. I think the social media fad is over. I’ve found that, other than interest-specific groups and (lately) political engagement, I have no use for it. The phone and e-mail still allows me to keep in touch with friends and relatives just as well as it did before the rise of Myspace (remember them?) and Fakebook. I’ve no doubt this is true for most people, if they take the time to think about it.
If you must have social media, I’d say the top choices are MeWe, Minds.com, and Steemit. The last two did not work for me, as they require a separate cell phone number per individual account for verification purposes, and we have only one smart phone grudgingly kept for emergencies. Others may have no issues with this, and otherwise they are good platforms.
There are some truly cutting-edge websites at neocities.com, but those are for folks who like IPFS. The forums are voat are a popular alternative to reddit. The chans (mostly 4chan and 8ch) are very impolite forums. The bitcoin guys have bitcoin-centered communications media. A few months ago I would have endorsed the free blogs available at wordpress.com but they have had at least one bad censorship case.
ALLKPOP.com is administered by SONE Engineers the geniuses who built the secret space station orbiting VENUS!
Their tech secrets are hidden within numerous forum threads!
do you have a Gab.ai -> now Gab.com account?
They value privacy and doesn’t censor.
It’s growing fast and continually upgrading the site.
I want to make one point which I try to make everywhere I can: the scale of available potential storage for the people of the world to store our decentralized social media is greater than people pretend it is. Suppose there are several billion computers/phones/tablets in the world, each with gigabytes of storage that are all on the Web. That’s gigabytes per HUMAN MIND for EVERY HUMAN MIND IN EXISTENCE. The future is decentralized, yes, but way more than any of these alternatives would have you believe. Be skeptical of any decentralization solution which you can’t SERVE on your own machines trivially. That is to say, building your own social network for your block, the local park, your local school, club, church, etc. etc. should be as easy as starting a new group is on facebook(point and click). Until that’s true, demand MORE decentralization. In a world where social media is a weapon, HTML literacy is equivalent to basic competence in any other weapon of self defense. Learn it. HTML, Javascript, CSS and PHP are as important for fighting Evil in this world as any gun, knife or water purifier.
I use weRstars. Really cool site which you’d probably consider social media, although they call it a digital platform. I save moments of my life, add keywords to find those moments later like “travel”, “work”, etc. Can still share things by tagging others and it’s one of the coolest looking site/app around. Just the stars in the sky concept, the fact that you see all of your life on one page, really cool.
I stumbled upon it from the intro video on youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XPNVebBAgs), then heard the founder on the radio a couple of weekends ago – maybe three weekends now. He shared his page on air, so you can see what the founders page looks like to get an idea (https://www.werstars.com/user/dgolokhov). It’s cool.
What you’re talking about in the article is to fill the need of sharing and social conversation – for lack of a better term – when free speech gets cut off. weRstars is kind of in there but it’s different; it fills a need that none of the networks out there now and the new ones in this list really fill. Helps with saving things personally, being able to find them easily, reviewing your moments and having gratitude, but also being able to share. And you can see the potential as it’s a completely different way to store information. I.E. if a brand, company started to use it to save their history. It’s free. I love it so far.
thanks for all these new ones I was not familiar with. I mostly use Steemit, d-tube and bitchute.
I’ve been trying out MeWe and Minds. I find MeWe easier to use, and I have a few friends who have joined there, but most people I know are not there (which may be bad or may be good). I haven’t quite figured out Minds yet, but I’ll keep trying.
I haven’t enjoyed Gab.ai, but it might be mostly because I haven’t ever really enjoyed Twitter either.
The only way to ensure privacy is keep your information off the web entirely. When I want to connect with friends I call them, or they can stop by and chat face-to-face like real human beings. Ill put coffee on…
My problem is that I need a “share” icon on the article in order to share it, together with my reply to it. It’s also important that my posts reach as large an audience as possible. Eg: On this article there only 2 shares – twitter and facebook. So to share this article, and most of Daisy Luther’s fine articles,I have to use twitter.
Marlene, what social media outlet are you looking for? I’ll do my best to get that added.
There are other alternative social media sites besides these. There’s also http://www.bareit.us.
Minds.com is a decent Facebook imitation that supports free speech.
A conservative community based site that does not censor your content or sell your information similar to Facebook is Freedoms Square at community.defendfreedoms.com. Since it is a membership supported platform we do not have outside influences dictating policy. it is a place where you can post your ideas, ideology, and opinions as long as you do it with respect and decency. The Standard membership is free which gives you the basic Facebook timeline, posting, friends and followers features while allowing to browse the public areas of the platform. We encourage a visit and let us know what you think.
Unfortunately, social media alternatives, even for this Michigan 28-year-old Autistic yet threaten me on social media alternatives as much as Big Tech ones.
1. Minds for example, yes I get the point it’s a social media alternative and doesn’t censor you unlike Big Tech Social Media, but the lack of people who followed me there! Even, yet get so harassed on Minds every day nearly!
2. BitChute and Rumble, YouTube alternatives, people screwed my chances as a YouTube alternative content creator!
3. I guess, even small content creators of left-wings don’t like the real truth! Even on Social Media alternatives like Minds, BitChute, and Rumble!
The point is I’d quit my hunt as a find for a social media alternative as much as a YouTube alternative in my personal life! Even a 28-year-old Autist from Michigan cannot handle staying on Social Media alternatives.
I will be boycotting Minds and BitChute to go out of business to let leftist people take advantage of me as social media alternatives who don’t do their jobs on reporting people! Bitcoin yet blows for internet money frauds!