💾 Archived View for squid.flounder.online › tech › alternative-social-media-services.gmi captured on 2022-04-28 at 19:14:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Introduction to Alternative Social Media Services
Problems with Mainline Social Media Services
Evaluation of Alternative Social Media Services
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These are some sites that are slated as alternatives to big feed social sites like Facebook & Twitter.
Minds is a simple feed social website and app. It has an app and a website, as well as a separate chat app. You can download the app from Google Play, but you will need to download an update afterward from the Minds website in order to access comments. Minds claims that this is to protect their app from being removed from the Google Play store.
This is my favorite feed social alternative, and if you are looking for one, I would recommend Minds.
The community on Minds is a wide variety of people. There are a lot of artists, writers, and photographers who use the service alongside political folks.
One thing that is notable about Minds is that there is a large amount of posts about Covid-19, and discussion of the pandemic and conspiracies and controversies surrounding the pandemic constitute a massive bulk of the content on Minds.
It is easy to curate your feed though, because you see everything in order of when it was posted. You will need to balance your following though! Some people post good stuff, but sometimes they post so much they will drown out your other subscriptions. So you have to be careful about that.
Gab is an alternative feed social site that is very well refined and very well developed. It is probably the best alternative social media app in terms of technical capability and quality of UI design.
In my opinion gab has a lot of potential, but I think it makes a few mistakes which hinder its ability to accomplish its stated goal. More on that in the cons section.
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At one point, Greg Abbott basically said that Gab was littered with Nazis, and that it was anti-semitic and had "No place in Texas".
I support free speech, so I expect that "Nazis" or "Jihadis" or any other extremist might exist on a global public forum. The defense against this charge is simple: It's only populated by Nazis because they're the ones who are already banned from mainline social media. If normal people would leave social media and use alternatives, the extremist population would be much smaller relatively speaking.
All that being said, Gab really does itself no favors by acting overtly right-wing and undermining its neutrality, especially when they have such a solid product already delivered.
Parler is an interesting one, seemed to pop up out of the blue during the Trump days, and then a bunch of politicians and famous people decided to hop on there and promote it.
This sort of thing is always weird to me, as someone who has been exploring alternative technologies for years. When Republicans were subject to criticism and propaganda during the Trump presidency, suddenly a lot of them wanted to jump to this "Parler"
It's convenient that every time a high-profile person is censored, they move to an alternative social media I've *never* heard of, or they try to make their own and sell it to you.
Why don't these folks ever jump on Minds? Hop on Gab? Post some stuff to Bitchute? Not until they get banned, and still go to something random or new.
Some peculiarities of Parler include a somewhat unique user flow, which is just a bit confusing and different from what you are used to. Another peculiarity is the very "United States" themed terms of service and branding of the platform. It is certainly aimed at American Republicans.
Pros of Parler
Cons of Parler
Mastodon is another social media alternative. I have never used it. But it is more popular and mentioned frequently in gemini space.
Going to continue updating this article to add more content until the end of time