My opinon of social media
When I was little we had a Hungarian social network which was inevitably replaced by Facebook. I was excited to use all these new ways to connect with others online and see what they were up to.
I had no idea Facebook was going to stay with us for over a decade and counting (at least here). I was used to sites coming and going but all the major social media we use today stuck around. Not just because they were better than the alternatives, it's just near impossible to compete with the userbase these sites have now. Even if users' data gets sold to advertisers or used to train AI, people stay, because everyone else is there. A new social network with no users isn't exactly... social.
Many people used to have their own website to show whatever they wanted to share, before social media became unavoidable. And many people create their own websites even today, to get away from the addictive platforms that are designed to maximize your screen time. These platforms heavily limit creativity by only allowing a profile picture and a bio for the most part. This is also one reason why I decided to create my own site with my interests, projects and whatever I feel worth putting on here. I never considered myself to be very creative (outside solving programming problems) but having a place that's truly mine feels right. And I can take my site wherever I want, because it's just a couple of files.
Social media however is much easier to use than forums or anything else that came before. I don't personally have a problem with the concept of social networks, I just think that it's not a service that should be run by private corporations. I think everyone should have control over their own social life and ideally have full ownership of the way they communicate, although that's not practical since not everyone is a software developer.
This is why I've been using decentralized social media like Mastodon, where anyone can run a server, but nobody has to because there are plenty to pick from. To join, you need to find a place you like that accepts registrations. Once you have an account somewhere on the network, you can follow anyone, regardless of where they share their content (as long as they're using a similar decentralized site). Of course, generally you can't see what people post on traditional social media, except Threads, which has limited support for the ActivityPub protocol these projects use.
I run my own set of decentralized social media sites (Mastodon for short posts, PeerTube for videos, Pixelfed for photos) for myself. I also run the nest, an artist-focused set of sites.
2025.12.14. 2:40