No, of course you didn’t. But this is short, and you’d better read it anyway.

Tomorrow there are the US 2022 midterm elections (more on this below), but as far as I can tell you are all screaming at Twitter, leaving Twitter, staying on Twitter, going Mastodon or explaining Mastodon.

Me, I’ve been writing for ten years now (1) that all the usual, grandiose solutions to those problems, from the likes of FreedomBox and Diaspora to the calls to “break up Facebook”… were half unnecessary, half counterproductive hacks, whose only result would be this:

that is, to make Facebook, Twitter &C double, no: triple their users (2.934B in 2022), while poisoning fruitful political debates everywhere.

These days, being flooded by YOUR interest in “alternatives to Twitter”, I dare suggest you may find useful, as food for thought if nothing else, to look at those proposals again.

What I propose, since 2012

As that strip says, we cannot fix social problems with information transfer protocols, that is with technology. But we will never fix those problems by sticking to technologies or architectures designed to create them. Try these three points, instead:

1. Stop wasting time running to Mastodon, asking to “break up” Facebook, reinventing the whole Internet or demanding “data portability” and “money for your data”. Demand, instead, mandatory open standards and interoperability for every type of communication (messaging/email, instant messaging, video calls…). WAY more effective, hugely simpler to implement
2. Forget any “home server” solution that 90% of the human beings actually existing today would or could never install. The only thing that will make enough difference, soon enough and long enough is portable personal clouds with their permanent domain names, offered “as-a-service”
3. Always-instant, always-on-by-default “communication” is toxic. This is painfully evident now. Make “slowness” mandatory, instead

What’s in this for ME

Thanks in advance for direct donations to support my larger work and for any help get me writing/research/advocacy work on these topics. Of course there is that too. But believe it or not, this is not the main point of this post.

What’s in this for YOU ALL

Never mind my bank account. And I don’t even care if I’m proven wrong, or what I say is right, but is implemented without me. Really.

Forget if and how Mastodon can replace Twitter. In the best case, that will be as effective as waterproofing a colander by sealing ONE of its holes. What matters is to start public discussions about the whole problem of “social media” that are realistic, sensible, feasible…

The REAL point here is that we do NOT have another decade to fix this mess before it becomes really irreversible. And since by now it’s obvious that certain ways don’t work, let’s at least look at it from a different point of view.

What I really want now is that you DO spend some time reading the stuff below, and ask everybody you know to do the same. Even if it were all wrong, it’s different enough from the rest that discussing it may help everybody to find realistic solutions, that actually work soon enough, for the majority of people.

The two reasons why I mentioned the US midterm elections

First, the Deep State does not want you to know but, according to inside sources, this huge event that will end less than 24 hours from now may have been just a tiny, tiny bit more polarizing and tribal than it used to be.

Second, because yes, that is an election with worldwide impact and this is just one meagre blog post. But if those rumors are true, one of the reasons may be just the fact that certain alternatives for social networking have been ignored so far.

What I ask you to read AND share (2):

• Personal Clouds to replace corporate-controlled-platforms
• OF COURSE, personal clouds should be offered as-a-service
• Demand RSS, not social media
• Breaking up Facebook? Einstein would not be happy
• What I wrote the first time (2017) the masses discovered Mastodon, here and here
• What if we just outlawed INSTANTNESS in social networks?
• “The more followers one has, the less air time she gets, period”

for much more of the same, click below the picture:

1. I am NOT the only one who preaches this kind of stuff! I never was. As just one example, my first point is almost equal to what Cory Doctorow describes as “adversarial interoperability”. But if my “vision” makes sense, it may be more practical than others
2. This post happened in the middle of a restructuring of all my websites. If you find broken links, be kind, and let me know