sparr | Entries tagged with new year

My recurring New Year Resolution is to use social networks other than Facebook before I use Facebook, for as long as I can stand to keep it up (I usually last about a month).

This year you can find me on the following sites:

https://www.reddit.com/user/sparr/submitted/ Reddit is a very popular meta-forum site with hundreds of millions of users and covering tens of thousands of topics. It also has a social network component; you can see what your friends post/comment everywhere (reddit.com/r/friends) and post to your own profile rather than a specific forum (“subreddit”).

https://mastodon.social/@sparr Mastodon is a federated* clone of Twitter.

https://sparr.dreamwidth.org/ Dreamwidth is a classic long form blog-like social network, forked from LiveJournal about a decade ago.

https://joindiaspora.com/u/sparr Diaspora is a federated* clone of early Facebook.

https://nextdoor.com/profile/16322983/ Nextdoor is neighborhood-scale location-filtered social networking.

https://twitter.com/sparr0 You probably already recognize Twitter.

https://fetlife.com/sparr Adult / Kinky / Sexy social network, I mostly use it for groups.

https://keybase.io/sparr A provable identity linking service with a social network component and features for chat and file sharing.

https://facebook.com/sparr0 Included for the sake of completeness.

* “federated” means the servers work like email. You can have your account on a public server or run your own, and everyone on every server can interact with everyone on all the other servers, unless your server blocks another for reasons like spam or illegal content. It’s a great concept that eliminates a lot of the centralization problems with services like Facebook and Twitter.

Crossposts: https://sparr0.livejournal.com/98965.html

Every year I commit to seriously using social networks other than Facebook. I read my news feed on other networks before visiting FB. I cross post things to other networks in addition to FB. This usually lasts for a few weeks, some years a couple of months, before the effort becomes too much and I fall back to just using FB and Reddit again with occasional forays onto Twitter and Instagram and Fetlife. Ever since the death of G+ I’ve had little hope of something getting the critical mass to dislodge FB from the collective habits of the generations around mine, but that doesn’t stop me from checking occasionally to see what’s out there.

The contenders from last year that I’ll be trying again this year are Mastodon (federated Twitter-like), Diaspora (federated Livejournal/Dreamwidth-like), NextDoor (neighborhood-restricted Facebook-like), and SubStack (Medium-like).

Last year’s contenders that I don’t currently plan to try again are MeWe and Lemmy.

I’m also using a few single-community sites on platforms like Mighty. If Mighty had a centralized news feed and client it would be a serious contender, but they don’t seem to be headed in that direction.

What else should I be trying this year? I’ve heard some folks mentioning Urbit which is relatively new, and Ello and Minds which I tried years ago, but none of them have jumped out at me as worth the effort now/again.

Crossposts: https://sparr0.livejournal.com/98680.html

Every year around the holidays I make a new year resolution to spend more time on less popular social networks and social media sites. I like to keep up with what new options are out there and revisit older platforms that I still have connections on. There are also plenty of reasons to avoid Facebook, and lately there's been enough ruckus about escaping Facebook that I'm publicizing my list again. Here are the sites and services I'll be using before[1] I use Facebook, from now til at least some point in the new year:

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

( Read more... )

Crossposts: https://sparr0.livejournal.com/93029.html

I will once again be adopting the New Year Resolution to read and post to other social networks before coming to Facebook, in an attempt to lessen its hold on my life and by extension the lives of my friends. I strongly encourage everyone else to do the same, at the very least so that you already have alternatives ready when Facebook goes down or gets blocked in your country or bans you or just starts censoring your posts.

You can find me in the following places:

https://www.reddit.com/user/sparr/submitted/ /u/sparr Add me as a friend and then you can use https://www.reddit.com/r/friends/ to see a "news feed" of everything your friends have posted.

https://mastodon.social/@sparr @sparr@mastodon.social Mastodon is a federated open source social network that functions vaguely similarly to Twitter.

https://sparr.dreamwidth.org/ Dreamwidth is a fork of LiveJournal, my oldest and favorite platform for long form writing, with some of the best privacy and anonymity options of any platform.

https://joindiaspora.com/people/98ece344da783437 sparr@joindiaspora.com Diaspora is a federated open source social network that functions vaguely similarly to Facebook.

https://nextdoor.com/profile/16322983/ Nextdoor is a neighborhood-based site where you can interact with people who live close to you. Some neighborhoods are pretty toxic, but others are chill and helpful... pretty much like real neighborhoods.

https://wt.social/u/sparr-risher Wiki Tribune is an attempt to build a social network around wiki concepts of people being able to collaboratively write and edit content.

https://beta.sociall.io/u/5e0a6372c9afde0cb4010981/feed A newcomer to the field, blockchain based, supposedly security-focused, can import friends and posts from Facebook.

https://www.minds.com/sparr/ I tried Minds a couple of years ago and it seems to have grown since then.

https://mewe.com/i/sparr MeWe is focused on interest-based communities.

https://twitter.com/sparr0 It's twitter.

https://sinblr.com/@sparr @sparr@sinblr.com This is another Mastodon instance ("federated" means it works like email; anyone can host a server, many people can use one server, and one person can have different accounts on different servers for different purposes) dedicated to adult themed content.

https://fetlife.com/sparr Fetlife is the most popular social network site for adult topics, functionally very similar to Facebook.

https://keybase.io/sparr Keybase is a service for secure identity management and verification that also offers file sharing and chat.

https://facebook.com/sparr0 @sparr0 I am also still on Facebook for now.

You can also find me on various instant messaging and chat platforms. In descending order of frequency, I use... Google Hangouts, Facebook Messenger, SMS, RCS, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp, Keybase, Steam. I am also active on Discord and various Slack instances, and can be reached via email at sparr0@gmail.com or my first name at protonmail dot com for more secure concerns.

#facebook #nextdoor #mastodon #dreamwidth #diaspora #reddit #internet #privacy #socialnetworks #keybase #wikitribune #sociall #mewe

Put more money into savings. One year of 12.5% contribution to my 401(k) has made up for multiple years of low/no retirement savings. The first year worth of stock grant at my employer also just vested, so that's a start to my short/medium-term savings (so I can buy a house in a year or three, maybe).

Donate more to charity. Katarina inspired me to make recurring donations to the ACLU and Planned Parenthood already. My irregular EFF donations are going to be made regular, and I'm going to add some to that.

Buy more art. My friends make art and their time is not worthless. I also consume a lot of art/media/entertainment that I don't have to pay for. Thanks to Winter for the idea of making a bunch of $1/mo Patreon commitments.

Help my friends and acquaintances more, financially. I make more in a day than many of my friends make in a week. I think I can work at least one day a month for them. Starting today.

Do something more interesting for housing than just living in a bus. I have three buses. I am actively pursuing leads for a small building and parking lot somewhere in SF or Oakland, so I can invite 5-10 people to live with me and make something unusual happen.

2008 has come and gone, and I think I will label it my best year yet. It had some low points, but overall a massive improvement over previous years, and a good indicator of things to come.
( The good, the bad, and the ugly. )

Current Mood: hopeful

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Clarence "Sparr" Risher

February 2025

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Page Summary

2022 New Year Resolution, alternative social networks
What social network platforms should I try in early 2022?
Alternative Social Networks, December 2020 Edition
2020 Facebook Alternatives Roundup
New year resolutions for 2017: (starting now, because fuck 2016)
2008 for me

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Clarence "Sparr" Risher

Entries tagged with new year

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2022 New Year Resolution, alternative social networks

What social network platforms should I try in early 2022?

Alternative Social Networks, December 2020 Edition

2020 Facebook Alternatives Roundup

New year resolutions for 2017: (starting now, because fuck 2016)

2008 for me