Projects

I got into decentralized social media a while ago and I truly believe it's the best solution to online communications. The way it works is that someone (like me) runs a server, and you can use that in a very similar way to the big platforms. There are several advantages (and disadvantages) however.

It's called decentralized because all these servers people run communicate with each other. What this means in practice is that if you have an account on my server, you can easily follow someone who registered on another site like mastodon.social. There are a number of different sites like this, and they all work together.

Of course one reason the traditional social media sites stayed popular is because they prevented this kind of open communication: you have to invite your friends if you want to talk to them. There's no easy way to escape if you don't like tha place anymore. With open social media platforms like Mastodon if you don't like how a server is run you can just leave and join another and take your followers with you.

This brings me to another advantage: actual human moderation. Traditional platforms employ various automated solutions to deal with spam and inappropriate behavior because it's very difficult (and expensive) to moderate millions of people manually. These systems make mistakes. The rules are also the same for the entire platform, meaning they completely disregard the differences in how different communities communicate internally. With decentralized platforms each server is run by an independent person or organization with their own rules. Reporting a post immediately notifies the moderation team so they can take action, and if you have a problem with how moderators behave, you can move to another server. Of course reacting after the fact is not ideal, and I've heard of some users having difficulties because of this. I haven't had any significant issue so far, but I also don't have a high-profile account.

I run my own servers because I like to not have to think about it much in terms of who runs the server. I prefer technical challenges instead, those I got a couple. I also started this nest project to try to get artists on the network. Not for profit or fame, I just want to follow my favourite muscians, digital artists etc. without having to use one of the big old sites. I have Mastodon (short posts), PeerTube (long-form videos), Pixelfed (photo sharing), Loops (short looping videos), Funkwhale (music) set up for this project so far.