Hey folks, I bet you’ve heard a lot of buzz about people leaving twitter and/or moving to “the fediverse” in the past couple of weeks. I’m sorry to beat a dead horse, but I have a proposition for you:
- What if you could join a social media service that was completely without corporate control, but still had strong content control mechanisms whose governance you yourself could participate in?
- What if you could build your own newsfeed with no advertising or ‘sponsored content’, filled with posts *only* from individuals and organizations you yourself had specifically subscribed to?
- What if, in addition to that feed, you had other feeds available with access to posts from people all over the world, and direct access to millions of members?
- What if when you joined this service, you could pick any one of thousands of independently operated servers (virtually all of which are free), each with it’s own local moderators you can actually communicate with and each with its own local culture, and that you could hop your user from one server to another whenever you wanted, if you found greener pastures elsewhere?
- What if you could create multiple accounts, even on multiple servers, such that you could manage separate identities to operate in different communities, and filter out all the garbage?
- What if, if you wanted to, you could run your own, single-user server that would still have access to the entire network, and make any rules you wanted?
- What if I told you I was helping to run one of those servers, and would love to have a bunch of you join it to a) help test it out, and b) get your first foothold in the “fediverse”?
It’s mastodon. Funny name, familiar function. Think “Twitter plus”. You can join at http://makersocial.online/ It’s free, and you know one of the guys who runs it!