Clarence "Sparr" Risher

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 my favorite platform for organized deep discourse, owing to its large userbase, wide variety of topical groups, and fully nested reply model. A little known feature that makes it much more social-network-like is https://reddit.com/r/friends which functions like the "news feed" on other sites, showing posts by your friends no matter which subreddit they post in.

https://www.reddit.com/user/sparr/ | sparr | /u/sparr

Mastodon is an open source federated clone of Twitter. Federated means no single company controls the network, and you get to pick the server where your data lives while still being able to interact with other people on other servers, sorta like picking an email service (you use gmail.com and your email lives on google servers, but you can send and receive email from people using yahoo or microsoft, etc). It uses ActivityPub to interact with other services in the Fediverse, so you can use a Mastodon account to follow not only people on other Mastodon servers, but also on Pixelfed or Friendica or other services I'm not trying this year but will eventually.

https://mastodon.social/@sparr | @sparr@mastodon.social

Diaspora is an open source federated social network with functionality similar to early Facebook or LiveJournal.

https://joindiaspora.com/people/98ece344da783437 | sparr@joindiaspora.com