Fun fact: It seems like I get paid more to design emoji than Twitter's emoji designer(s) do now - which is to say, they get paid nothing. lmao

[Source]

Twitter (or as its now insisting on calling itself, 'X' lmao) getting torn apart by Space Karen is a shame for many, and in this power vacuum, there's a real risk of jumping for the coolest looking thing in the room. This approach would be a big mistake, and might end up putting you at the same dumb corporate or ideological whims that made Twitter hell in the first place, and what enabled Twitter to get purchased by someone like Elon fucking Musk.

So I think that there needs to be ways for people to assess what level of risk they're willing to put up with, because you're not going to find that on the sign up page, and this is what this post aims to do. I am currently updating these every couple of months because the field is constantly changing and expanding, so stay tuned!

What makes a social media platform less risky in my opinion?

• The company structure should either be...
  • A privately owned company without odious investment (such as VC investment or investments from generally awful companies)
  • A worker-owned coop
• Rules need to cover basic principles like 'bigotry is not allowed'.
• Needs to have trustworthy-seeming people at the wheel, not Silicon Valley techbros.

(If you're interested in why I am singling out these specific company structures, I wrote a separate post about company structures and investment.)

These factors are pretty important in predicting who are you going to end up having to ditch in five years because the leaders make the place insufferable to be on, either because they need to make profit for their investors or shareholders, or because they have shitty beliefs about content moderation themselves.

This does not guarantee long-term success of a company or a platform - its currently not certain if social media can ever be done in a financially sustainable way - what this list is about is identifying risks that have already been seen before, things that are basically a guaranteed way to fuck things up far enough down the line.

There are also a few others I'm not recommending simply because they're ethically terrible and you'll see what I mean when I get to them.

Centralised or federated?

For decades, we have been used to centralised social media systems - social media run by one large entity. Twitter is run by Twitter, Facebook is run by Meta, and so on. Recently, there is an increasing amount of interest in 'federated' systems, that is social media systems that are run by a variety of providers that are inter-operating with each other.

This is not a new concept. Email runs like this - if you're a Gmail user, you can send an email to someone who is not a Gmail user. That's federation in a nutshell.

Some people (often techy people) say that federated is the way to go. I disagree and I think it's far more important how the service/software is designed and led, and what moderation looks like. Content moderation arguably is the main product of social media.

I will be explaining whether or not something is centralised or federated in this list not to pass a judgement, but to help you understand how to conceptualise it and how to sign up if you want to (because if it's federated, there's usually not a single place you can sign up). I will also be mentioning what those protocols are because unlike email, federated social networking have several competing protocols that are not inter-operable.

Disclosure!

I have been in a business relationship with one of the social networks listed here (Cohost). I still had the same opinion I have now before they approached me, but you know, knowledge is power.

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The List!!

✅ Low risk / sort of okay

Cara

Centralised - cara.app
Specific to visual artists
Run by volunteers, reasonable ToS.

Inkblot

Centralised - inkblot.art
Specific to visual artists

Run mostly by volunteers, raises money from donations, reasonable ToS.

Cohost

Centralised - cohost.org (this website)

Worker-owned coop, with decent community rules.

Mastodon

Federated - ActivityPub¹
Look at https://joinmastodon.org for how to get into this space.

It depends on what server you join - there are many community owned and run servers with good rules and moderation. I would say that the people who develop it are more responsive to marginalised communities than Bluesky by a meaningful amount and there are more robust tools to deal with bad actors and harrassment. It's broadly speaking probably one of the most safe experiences on social media outside of Cohost right now.

That being said, Mastodon communities in general have had a persistent anti-blackness problem, with PoC folks repeatedly finding themselves not having a good time. Some servers are trying to address this but as far as I'm aware this isn't fully resolved.

Pillowfort

Centralised - pillowfort.social

Private ownership, rules seem fine.

🤷 Not great

Bluesky

Federated - AT Protocol
The software that would make it federated is not yet public. Your only way to use it is on the official server at bsky.app.

It has Seed investment, which is not good. Seed investment is basically pre-VC money, it's investment to get the company to a spiffy enough point where VC vultures can start throwing money at it proper, so this is where it's headed.

It's a Public Benefit Corporation, but they haven't made their PBC charter public and if you've seen how Ello has gone (further down this list), it's a clear demonstration that a PBC is not a solid defense against a company doing awful things. They both have had investors, investors want money.

Bluesky's management and development team seem to be fairly traditional techy people, people who aren't very interested in anti-bigotry, anti-racism and generally protecting marginalised folks. This is pretty bad.

The silver lining is that it seems like the community that developed around Bluesky are more progressive than the team is, and so the team is forced to react to what this community is demanding of them. Even their board of directors seem to be more demanding than the development team. Community in the early stages of a social media platform is everything because they're incredibly hard to get rid of once you get them. So I think that this will be an ongoing feature of Bluesky going forward, whether the development team likes it or not.

DeviantArt

Centralised - deviantart.com
Specific to visual artists and writers

A formerly VC funded company that is now owned by Wix, a publicly traded company. Neither of these things are good.

Hive

Centralised - hivesocial.app

Got angel investment in a 'pre-seed' round. As mentioned before with Bluesky, seed investment is basically pre-VC investment, it does not bode well for their business trajectory.

Itaku

Centralised - itaku.ee
Specific to visual artists, especially the furry community

Raises funds through public donations which means it's probably private with no investors. However, it has no rules against bigotry and has rules against politics, both are huge red flags and IMO will likely lead to future issues with the kind of community base those kinds of rules tend to create.

Post.news

Centralised - post.news

VC-funded, including receiving funding from a16z - the VC firm that dumped billions into crypto bullshit.

It also did some creepy shit a while back where they pretended that big news outlets were using the platform to encourage those same news outlets to join. lol.

Spill

Centralised - spill.com

It's VC-funded.

Tumblr

Centralised - tumblr.com

Owned by Automattic, a heavily VC-funded company.

I probably don't need to explain the audience of Tumblr but like Bluesky, the audience is mostly progressive people who will and do expect things from the people running the site, and like Bluesky, this will only go so far because investors want money.

💀 Pretty bad

ArtStation

Centralised - artstation.com

Specific to visual artists in the entertainment industry

Owned by Epic Games, which in turn is 40% owned by Tencent (there's also smaller shareholdings by some other not particularly great companies).

I'm not singling out Tencent just for being a Chinese company², it is a company doing active harm on behalf of Chinese domestic and foreign policy interests. It creates integral parts of Chinese surveillance infrastructure such as WeChat, and applies Chinese soft power on western entertainment companies through buying shares. If people were penalised or not allowed to protest about Hong Kong or Taiwan in the NBA or at a video games tournament, Tencent is probably why.

Tencent also has a huge stake in Epic - your support and use of Epic Games products and platforms stands to benefit Tencent in a very real way. Of course, this is going to be harder than with something like Bandcamp and other companies they are gobbling up, but if you're not already using ArtStation and are just shopping around, you can just pass on this one, there are plenty of other fish in the sea.

Ello

Centralised - ello.co
Specific to visual artists

Ello was kind of hot shit for a while in the mid-10's, aiming to take particular fire at Facebook for various policies of theirs. They promised to not sell ads or user data, which was legally enshrined in their Public Benefit Corporation charter.

This is good, and to my knowledge they have not reneged on that. However, a PBC charter doesn't protect a company from doing all bad things.

The most recent incarnation of Ello (now owned by publicly traded company Talenthouse) is still somewhat geared at artists showing their work, but it seems like a good chunk of the service is geared at getting creative workers to throw themselves at brands, doing free labour in the hope of a single job. Gross!

Nostr

Federated - Nostr
The main project page is nostr.com.

Without a doubt, this is the most noxious of the three major federated social media protocols right now.

The biggest selling point of Nostr is 'censorship resistance'. Censorship (much like free speech) is like a big, nuanced and non-trivial concept, but thanks to reactionary idiots, its routinely become a shorthand for "Why can't I just post baseless things about IQ and race? I'm just asking questions!!!". It is the whining of people who don't want to be accountable to other people for what they say.

One of the standardised extensions for Nostr allows Nostr users to send crypto to each other, because of course it does. I took a little trip to their global feed, and it basically reads like a Bitcoiner forum, complete with conspiratorial bigotry.

It's a bad place to be by design, because it is designed to not be moderated and its audience mostly consists of deluded weirdos. Just flat out avoid!

Threads

Centralised - threads.net

Run by Instagram, which is owned by Meta (formerly called oops-we-facilitated-a-genocide Facebook). It kinda goes without saying for a Meta product, but this app is a privacy nightmare.

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Notes

1. There is plenty of other software working on ActivityPub, but Mastodon has the best UX for regular people and the software (that isn't a fork) with the most enduring commitment to creating spaces that aren't for assholes. This does not mean its perfect, but I think it's generally the only ActivityPub software worth mentioning for these reasons.
2. As far as I'm aware, in China if you have a company that gets large enough, the Chinese state will just forcibly involve themselves in your business, so Chinese megacorps generally have more direct involvement in the CCP's nasty business much more than a western corporation might be involved in their respective governments' nasty business.

In another rant to his faithful flock, Elon Musk has stated that Twitter/X will take away the blocking functionality to posts. Reply guys and harassers of the world rejoice.

If you or other folks need ideas for where to to move away from this platform, I have a frequently updated list of Twitter/X alternatives that rank them in order of how risky and how socially responsible they are.

Given how Twitter is starting to give material support to fascists, staying on Twitter is no longer just an issue of personal safety or job safety as a freelancer, but an ethical one too.

Your continued use of the site at this point will stand to materially benefit global fascism in a way that has not been previously seen on a major social network (perhaps outside of Facebook).

I'm not going to tell you that you should stop using it per se, but I think you really have to think about this.