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sparrWith Facebook and Tumblr taking further steps to alienate their users I expect now to be a great time to re-explore other social networks. My almost-new-year resolution is that I will only load the Facebook news feed on my laptop via a bookmark folder that also opens other social network feeds, to encourage me to read content outside my FB filter bubble and to post to other audiences on other sites. While none of them offer everything that Facebook does, all of them offer something(s) that Facebook does not. That folder currently contains (my profile name/link in parentheses for each):
Reddit originated as a news sharing and discussion site like Digg, but has expanded to include many more social components, including personal posts, friends you can follow, etc. It is actually my favorite platform for organized deep discourse currently, one of the few with fully nested comments. A feature most people don't know about is /r/friends which functions like other sites' "feed", showing posts by your friends. https://www.reddit.com/ (sparr / /u/sparr / https://www.reddit.com/user/sparr/)
Diaspora is an open source federated social network with functionality similar to LiveJournal or early Facebook. Federated means no single company controls the service, and you get to pick where your data lives, like picking an email service. https://diasporafoundation.org/ (sparr@joindiaspora.com / https://joindiaspora.com/people/98ece344da783437)
Dreamwidth is a clone of LiveJournal, popularized when Russian influence on the company running LJ became too much for most communities to deal with. https://dreamwidth.org (https://sparr.dreamwidth.org/)
Mastodon is a federated clone of Twitter. https://joinmastodon.org/ (@sparr@mastodon.social / https://mastodon.social/@sparr)
NextDoor is a social network with a strong geographic component. You are limited to interacting with people who live near you, in areas as small as a neighborhood or as large as half a city. Some neighborhoods are great, some are very dysfunctional, and I don't just mean on NextDoor :) https://nextdoor.com (https://nextdoor.com/profile/16322983/)
Medium is not a social network. It is more of a blogging platform. I am going to cross post my long form writings there because people keep telling me I need to post them somewhere they might get attention or traction outside of a social network. https://medium.com/ (https://medium.com/@sparr0)
MeWe seems to be filling the niche Google Plus failed to fill, with a social network that has a strong focus on interest-based groups and communities, including chat rooms for each community. https://mewe.com (sparr / https://mewe.com/i/sparr)
October is an experiment by some acquaintances of mine. By posting popular content you earn the right to engage in persistent-pseudonymous discussion, where someone can't know your real profile but can keep track of which comments are whose within a particular thread. I am interested to see how this attempt at auto-moderated anonymity works out. https://october.app/qr/JNZHW (https://october.app/user/sparr)
I am also still on Facebook for now. https://facebook.com (sparr0 / @Sparr Risher / https://facebook.com/sparr0)
You can find some of these accounts linked to my Keybase account, which is a service for secure identity management and verification that also offers file sharing and chat. https://keybase.io (https://keybase.io/sparr)
Reddit originated as a news sharing and discussion site like Digg, but has expanded to include many more social components, including personal posts, friends you can follow, etc. It is actually my favorite platform for organized deep discourse currently, one of the few with fully nested comments. A feature most people don't know about is /r/friends which functions like other sites' "feed", showing posts by your friends. https://www.reddit.com/ (sparr / /u/sparr / https://www.reddit.com/user/sparr/)
Diaspora is an open source federated social network with functionality similar to LiveJournal or early Facebook. Federated means no single company controls the service, and you get to pick where your data lives, like picking an email service. https://diasporafoundation.org/ (sparr@joindiaspora.com / https://joindiaspora.com/people/98ece344da783437)
Dreamwidth is a clone of LiveJournal, popularized when Russian influence on the company running LJ became too much for most communities to deal with. https://dreamwidth.org (https://sparr.dreamwidth.org/)
Mastodon is a federated clone of Twitter. https://joinmastodon.org/ (@sparr@mastodon.social / https://mastodon.social/@sparr)
NextDoor is a social network with a strong geographic component. You are limited to interacting with people who live near you, in areas as small as a neighborhood or as large as half a city. Some neighborhoods are great, some are very dysfunctional, and I don't just mean on NextDoor :) https://nextdoor.com (https://nextdoor.com/profile/16322983/)
Medium is not a social network. It is more of a blogging platform. I am going to cross post my long form writings there because people keep telling me I need to post them somewhere they might get attention or traction outside of a social network. https://medium.com/ (https://medium.com/@sparr0)
MeWe seems to be filling the niche Google Plus failed to fill, with a social network that has a strong focus on interest-based groups and communities, including chat rooms for each community. https://mewe.com (sparr / https://mewe.com/i/sparr)
October is an experiment by some acquaintances of mine. By posting popular content you earn the right to engage in persistent-pseudonymous discussion, where someone can't know your real profile but can keep track of which comments are whose within a particular thread. I am interested to see how this attempt at auto-moderated anonymity works out. https://october.app/qr/JNZHW (https://october.app/user/sparr)
I am also still on Facebook for now. https://facebook.com (sparr0 / @Sparr Risher / https://facebook.com/sparr0)
You can find some of these accounts linked to my Keybase account, which is a service for secure identity management and verification that also offers file sharing and chat. https://keybase.io (https://keybase.io/sparr)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-13 10:50 pm (UTC)Mastodon is federated, like email. That means that you choose a server where your data will live, and you rely on that server to talk to other servers to exchange information that you want from users who have chosen those other servers and that they want from you. This is also how Diaspora and a few other decentralized social networks function.
Usernames on Mastodon (and Diaspora) look like email addresses; You have a username on a domain; I am "@sparr@mastodon.social". Anyone using any mastodon server can follow me by providing that name/address, and I can follow them.
Users on the same server can omit the server name when referring to each other (again, just like email, although that's an archaic feature). Because JB and I are both using mastodon.social, I can refer to him as just "@jbsegal", and vice versa, but we both have to refer to our friend "@heironymous@chaos.social" by their full name/address, and heironymous has to refer to us with the "@mastodon.social" domain suffix.
For any explicit mention or follow, your server will go find the other user on the specified domain, and so you can get a news feed with the posts of the people you are following.
That leaves the "public feed". A mastodon server has two public feeds (by default, as the code exists now). One is all the public posts on that mastodon server, the "local feed". If you join an interest-based mastodon server, the local feed will look like a mashup of a facebook group and the individual walls of everyone in that group. The other is the "federated feed", which is every post on every other server that it knows about, and that list is comprised of all the servers on which local users follow at least one person and a few other sources. Your mastodon server admins can decide to exclude certain other servers from your federated feed, for reasons of content or otherwise, but that would not block you from following or browsing to the feed of a person on that server.