Better, More Open Social Media

We’ve been thinking a lot lately about how social media should be more decentralized, owned by it’s own content creators, have better privacy, not have politically biased censorship, and be more secure.

Alternatives

So far here are some of the best social media network alternatives that we’ve come across:

Facebook and Twitter Alternatives

Since Facebook is known for a large amount of privacy and security issues, let’s look at some alternatives below.

Friends plugin for WordPress

Friends is a free plugin for the open source WordPress, which is already the worlds most popular blogging platform. The Friends plugin leverages a lot of existing open web technologies for social media purposes. It is great for those wanting to own their own content, and have some posts be open to everyone, but still be able to have some posts kept private for only close friends and family.

It does require the free WordPress to run, for which cheap and fast web hosting can easily be found. This carries with it the advantage that you can host it on your own domain name, which means that you can have 100% control over it, which is something not offered by most other alternatives.

Mastodon

Mastodon is another open social media platform, which is a great alternative to both Facebook and Twitter. Mastodon is different in that it doesn’t require you to run a server, but instead allows you to choose from a variety of “instances” and apps. Mastodon has a number of free third party apps that support it’s platform. It is robust enough that even Trump is making his own social media platform based on Mastodon code.

This doesn’t offer quite as much control though though, as the Friends plugin with WordPress, since it you can’t really run it as your own blog. But, you if you already have a WordPress site you can install some plugins that allow you to connect to Mastodon.

GETTR

Gettr bills itself as a brand new social media platform founded on the principles of free speech, independent thought and rejecting political censorship and “cancel culture.” This platform has become more and more popular lately as Twitter has removed medical doctors like Dr Robert Malone (one of the inventors of mRNA vaccine technology), from their platform over not supporting their vaccine narrative. While it might be better (bettr?) in the way of having more freedom of speech, the technology doesn’t seem to inherently have a decentralized nature.

WhatsApp Alternatives

Since WhatsApp is now owned by FaceBook (which as we mentioned has privacy, security and censorship problems), so let’s look at some alternatives. Two of the biggest are Telegram and Signal.

Signal app

Signal app is reportedly trusted by many privacy advocates, including Edward Snowden and Elon Musk, who has been known to avoid Facebook owned apps like WhatsApp.

Telegram app

Telegram app has become very popular as a messaging app, has has some more customization available, but isn’t quite as secure.

Best Secure Chat?

Which is best? Take a look at Tom’s Guide review to see the strong and weak points of each, but they surmise in their bottom line that “if security is your priority, Signal is the obvious pick.”

Other Alternatives?

Any other strong social network alternatives you think we missed? Tell us below in the comments which is your favorite alternative.