On The Subject of Decentralized Social Media
Written by Aexana
Decentralized Social Media and How To Both Navigate and Propagate It
the second red scare is harder to form a resistance against than before because of the way the industrialization of pleasure and trauma reduces the nervous system to a programmable interface through a sensory feedback loop. tv screens hang down in front of you, convincing you to gorge on it. what comes off as the whims of hapless executives and their celebrities is calculated trauma and sexuality so bloody and sociopathic that the subsequent hypnosis both subjugates and caresses the mind at a dissonant angle. you don’t pick up the weapon because others have ensnared you in the mindnumbing bliss of their lifestyle and ideology. you don’t resist addictive interfaces because there’s always some incomplete feeling, object, or person or idea. now you can’t form your own.
now there’s not even humans teaching you anymore. we don’t need them to teach. we don’t need them to sing. we don’t need them to speak. we don’t want them to act, write, produce, hear, see, or breathe unless it’s on our command. we need you to obey. pipes billowing steam, metal parts grinding, squeezing, crushing, warping, shrinking, and growing at hypnotic rates, disarming you in preparation to be compacted into currency itself.
all that noise begins to mount, dear user. all the fire and smoke starts to eclipse the sun.
what has to change about revolution in the late-stage of capitalism, now erected with tendrils to puppeteer any lifeforms capable of offsetting its trajectory, is the way we think. we don’t need just mutual aid, or just decentralized social media, in the face of techno-fascist authoritarianism. we need a subsystem performing at a rate that the system can’t deflect and strangle out of existence.
in the age of digital surveillance and the suffocating smell of sulfur or plastic, you need technology that they can’t use to manipulate your life. that is true. the problem is that no one cares if it simply exists. you need to find a way to have these systems become interwoven and accessible from all digital or physical angles possible. consider how the activitypub extension works in software like mastodon or peertube. from a mastodon account stored in any instance, you can make comments on any peertube video.
you can think of it as how things worked back when we had digg. the same thing applied, where all it required was an account extension to share information and have a voice on public matters. they tore this in half, but it still exists, shrunken to the size of a rat, regenerating with its federated feed churning at the speed of unfiltered information overload.
nonetheless, this activitypub island is the final bastion of free speech and digital sovereignty, and should be seen as such. otherwise, the internet is no longer a place to connect with others. it can only be this again when we get a grip.
[_federation]
on platforms like twitter, tiktok, reddit or facebook, content visibility is often determined by algorithms that prioritize certain posts based on engagement metrics, becoming echo chambers with frequent manipulation. federation prevents this by allowing engagement with users in any decentralized server connecting the federated platform together, typically through a central news feed or other srcs of aggregated feedback.
federation is a noun which regards an organization formed by merging several groups or parties. so when i mention a “federated feed”, i am talking about various posts being assembled into one feed from different users on a very large network.
in this configuration, everyone’s voice can be heard and has a chance to start a discussion or build a following.
[_mastodon]
mastodon is a federated microblog which acts highly similar to that of twitter, of course leveraging decentralization and federation to create a fair space for discussion and sharing. imagine a twitter where people can see what you have to say without likes, retweets, checkmarks or view counts getting in the way.
each instance of mastodon, much like lemmy and those which are mentioned afterwards, each relate to different subjects, wherein you may find a like-minded community at all.
recommended instance: transfem.social
[_friendica]
facebook, meet your far hotter evil twin, friendica. having been established in 2010, it has many of the design features which made facebook feel so nostalgically pretty, alongside (improved) features which made Facebook mechanically enjoyable whatsoever.
much like facebook, it allows you to “add” contacts from other parts of the internet too, like bluesky, mastodon, GNU Social, damn near every other decentralized/federated app, and post content to websites like Tumblr or WordPress.
[_peertube]
as it has been said in the past, peer-to-peer networks only go without large degrees of financial support because of the fact that capitalists cannot set up “toll gates” for all of their users. they cannot control the service with their funding, so they’d rather build a service, like youtube or spotify, where this can be achieved.
peertube stands in opposition to this by way of the fact that no centralized entity controls the instances that emerge, and the corruption of one instance does not affect the stability of another.
peertube uses peer-to-peer networks to distribute traffic evenly and maintain bandwidth speeds when streaming large or popular videos. due to its federation capabilities, one instance of peertube can share videos of another, without the shared instance needing to do the same. this makes peertube a “youtube for the people”, and it should be used and respected as such.
example (tankie.tube): https://tankie.tube/w/6qesTm873ncYhdsPUc1YZF
-# example (Nothing to Hide - a documentary about mass surveillance): https://media.zat.im/w/35badfed-5322-48ac-b5c1-71b1ad88262e