In a cointelpro op the aim is to dissolve and break up movements. Parler etc seem to have had the aim of amplifying and providing cover (a way to coordinate in secret) to the violent jan 6th extremists.
True and fb will have a wider social graph context.
Though it seems useful (for threat monitoring) to also have trimmed self-selections with only people who want to communicate privately and "speak freely".
A couple things I can tell you in case you wanted to ask:
- How different is from FB? I have no idea, because I never had a FB account. But see below.
- I heard that Mewe is/was a place "dominated" by Alt-Right or Right-wingers.
Not in my experience: I stick to groups that cater for my hobbies (calligraphy, drawing, Martial Arts, tabletop gaming) and the political debate is basically zero. Maybe there are specific groups for that.
- Spammers/Scammers? Each group with more than a couple hundred members tends to collect some bots. They are easy to deal with and not a big nuisance.
- I miss Google+, is this good replacement?
Yes and no. The #1 feature I miss (and I suggested this as paid extra, to no avail) is that even if you mark one of your posts as "Public" it just means that it will be visible by any other MeWe member that might happen to do a search or just visit your profile.
But you cannot share the link to the post outside of MeWe.
(For me this is a big problem, because I often bookmarked my own posts on Google+ to refer back to them when I wanted to show something to other people).
Of course my success in convincing friends and contacts to follow me on MeWe is measured in Imaginary Numbers. FB still dominates, and even if I had managed to convince lots of people to follow me on Google+, it never really become a hit for them.
- What about Censorship (NSFW, at least)?
This is something I never really investigated in detail. I suppose you will not have too many problems as long as you mark your posts (or groups) as "adult only". I did not notice a lot of Adult activity around (but then again, I tend to stick to a dozen groups, and never really explore the rest of MeWe).
Well, this seems to be just about everything most people wanted Facebook to be. Yet all I see here is (mostly-warranted) doubt and criticism.
Makes me wonder if an ideal service ever does come along, would we even be able to give it enough of a chance for it to stick? Or have we just been burned so badly, we'll never trust again?
I don’t see a positive message anywhere. I see that they’re against certain things, but what do they positively offer? Is the experience truly better or is it just “not THAT”.
Experience-wise, mewe is way ahead of facebook, especially after the disastrous "redesign". The audience, of course, is much smaller, that's a downside.
Is it...at least decentralized? Doesn't seem to be. The main issues here are not whether some centralized entity does good things or whether some centralized entity does bad things but rather that there is a centralized entity. This entity could shift from doing good things to doing bad things whenever they feel like it, and are free to take the entire network with them.
I'm not going to join some new service on the basis of "trust us, we swear lol." Show me a protocol, not a service.
Maybe non-predatory social media and profit-driven production just aren't compatible.
There was a point in the development of the internet when we switched, without a lot of discussion at the time or since, from a world of collaboratively-developed, open and decentralized protocols, to a world of private silos. It's like the internet developed to the point of creating HTTP and then that one broke things from there on out — can you think of a single major communications protocol that was created after HTTP and is still in use? Seems like it's pretty hard for open distributed protocols to compete with the convenience of vertical, for-profit sites.
If we can ever sort out the problems with cryptocurrencies+smart contracts, one of them might someday provide a path to creating the right set of incentives allow splitting protocol creation, hosting, and maintenance once again. No idea if that will come to pass though.
I haven't been on a social network since Google- jumped the shark in 2015, and I don't miss it. I'm certainly not going to be associated with a platform whose name rhymes with a childhood euphemism for piss (weewee).
I haven’t thought about the format enough to really nail it down - but some kind of facilitated contact grouping and photo sharing via iMessage would be attractive to me (as a proto-social network without all the BS).
True! I'm thinking that something like Beeper[1] could be helpful there. They actually have an iMessage bridge even for users on Android. It's amazing haha.
I did something similar as an experiment and started a Slack for people who had physically been to my home. Unfortunately the intersection with “People who use Slack daily” was small enough it has never gotten past the 5-10 user stage. But it’s fun for what Twitter used to be for me.
Not preventing spam was also the downfall of… oh man I can’t even remember the name right now. They built their own crypto currency social network. And added chat that uses Matrix protocol.
Thank you for sharing the link. I like the idea of standardization among smaller social media platforms. Basically, the success of a platform built on ActivityPub becomes more tied to the success of ALL platforms built on ActivityPub.
The site looks like it was based off a template and a cheap one at that. It doesn't strike me as trust-worthy nor are the people deeply invested in making something that will last and be worth investing my time and social network into.
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[ 89.4 ms ] story [ 891 ms ] threadCons: No users, dark mode costs $2 a month
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdca/pr/fbi-s-encrypted-phone-p...
I think that's a difference worth considering.
Though it seems useful (for threat monitoring) to also have trimmed self-selections with only people who want to communicate privately and "speak freely".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel
A couple things I can tell you in case you wanted to ask:
- How different is from FB? I have no idea, because I never had a FB account. But see below.
- I heard that Mewe is/was a place "dominated" by Alt-Right or Right-wingers. Not in my experience: I stick to groups that cater for my hobbies (calligraphy, drawing, Martial Arts, tabletop gaming) and the political debate is basically zero. Maybe there are specific groups for that.
- Spammers/Scammers? Each group with more than a couple hundred members tends to collect some bots. They are easy to deal with and not a big nuisance.
- I miss Google+, is this good replacement? Yes and no. The #1 feature I miss (and I suggested this as paid extra, to no avail) is that even if you mark one of your posts as "Public" it just means that it will be visible by any other MeWe member that might happen to do a search or just visit your profile. But you cannot share the link to the post outside of MeWe. (For me this is a big problem, because I often bookmarked my own posts on Google+ to refer back to them when I wanted to show something to other people). Of course my success in convincing friends and contacts to follow me on MeWe is measured in Imaginary Numbers. FB still dominates, and even if I had managed to convince lots of people to follow me on Google+, it never really become a hit for them.
- What about Censorship (NSFW, at least)? This is something I never really investigated in detail. I suppose you will not have too many problems as long as you mark your posts (or groups) as "adult only". I did not notice a lot of Adult activity around (but then again, I tend to stick to a dozen groups, and never really explore the rest of MeWe).
Anything else you want to ask, just write here.
[1] https://www.bizjournals.com/sanjose/news/2013/07/11/sgrouple...
Makes me wonder if an ideal service ever does come along, would we even be able to give it enough of a chance for it to stick? Or have we just been burned so badly, we'll never trust again?
I don’t see a positive message anywhere. I see that they’re against certain things, but what do they positively offer? Is the experience truly better or is it just “not THAT”.
1)You're part of a community that imploded when G+ closed which has moved to Mewe
2)You're obsessively anti-FB and dont' care that you're posting to an empty room.
I've been on it since 2018 (reason #1) and don't really see any other positives.
For that reason, I dont really recommend any alternatives right now, sadly.
I'm not going to join some new service on the basis of "trust us, we swear lol." Show me a protocol, not a service.
Maybe non-predatory social media and profit-driven production just aren't compatible.
https://joinmastodon.org/
Based on the W3C recommendation, ActivityPub.
https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/
There are other interoperable implementations noted here:
https://git.feneas.org/feneas/fediverse/-/wikis/watchlist-fo...
If we can ever sort out the problems with cryptocurrencies+smart contracts, one of them might someday provide a path to creating the right set of incentives allow splitting protocol creation, hosting, and maintenance once again. No idea if that will come to pass though.
Trivially, HTTPS.
Not to detract from your larger point, with which I tend to agree...
Please have at least some text on your site, an about link or whatever. Something.
Apple Messages might be the best social media for me at the moment.
[1]: https://www.beeper.com/
How do social networks reach that "critical mass" of users?
Michelle Lim makes a great case for this here:
https://www.michellelim.org/writing/into-the-fediverse/
But why would anyone trust a closed source platform running on someone else's infra?