If you are fed up with facebook, join one of the Mastodon servers. Pick e.g. social.vivaldi.net and sign up if you don’t necessarily need locally relevant content out of the box. If you want locally relevant content out of the box, pick a server for e.g. Berlin, the Ruhr area, NRW, or Cologne instead, or search for a server elsewhere in the world. You can switch servers later if you want to. It’s not hard, don’t worry too much about that choice.
If you are fed up with Instagram, join pixelfed.social for an international community, or pixelfed.de for a mostly german speaking community. Install the newly released Pixelfed mobile app for iOS or Android if you like mobile apps.
If you want to get rid of WhatsApp, download Signal for your smartphone.
“Don’t build your community infrastructure on top of the goodwill of a benevolent dictator” is what I hope people learn from the past 5 years.
“Don’t build your community infrastructure on top of the goodwill of a benevolent dictator” is good advice. If that is not motivation enough, MacStories explains in detail how facebook’s dehumanizing and harmful moderation policies are driving them away, and I could not agree more.
But moving away from a centralized social network can hurt, and a lot of people have probably unlearned what it means to actively curate and maintain digital relationships. It is just too easy to simply consume and broadcast instead of having meaningful interaction. I don’t think I’m the only one experiencing this. Still, for systemic change to happen at scale the friction of change needs to be as low as possible, the pull effects need to be there, and the conditions pushing folks away from the current platform need to be big enough, too. Ideally there is some momentum. “Aufbruchstimmung” we say in German, an atmosphere of departure.
Many times I have heard “Mastodon is too difficult to adopt” (and it for sure has its problems), but we also learn to pilot two-ton killing machines 🚗 just to buy our groceries or drive to work. Or we learn to play an instrument 🎸 to impress someone. Some learn math. 🤯 The question is as always: do you feel investing the time and effort is worth it?
Finding an ethically run Mastodon server is for sure harder than signing up for facebook, or the next centralized, venture capital funded system that will go to shit when the time is right. But it is also much easier than you might think, and it feels so, so much better. The only solution to counter “vendor lock-in” is interoperability.
I moved to Mastodon on indieweb.social when Twitter was bought by Elon Musk, and went to shit shortly afterwards. I even archived my tweets and transferred them to a static page because I thought I might “need” them. That’s how much I had tied my identity to the tweets, that “brand” that I thouhgt I had created. I haven’t looked at them or referenced them even once in the past years.
It took me a while to browse through the vast amount of available servers before I made a decision. I wanted to “pick the right one”, and I did not want to make a mistake. Not understanding that I could actually move servers quite easily, I thought this would be a big commitment.
It wasn’t.
But the simple anticipation of that friction of maybe having to switch platforms again caused some decision paralysis. In the end I landed on indieweb.social because the values and vibe of the indieweb community resonated with me. I came for the vibe. And I stayed because the admin is a good captain of that ship. Shortly afterwards I started supporting the server financially via Patreon.
Now facebook went to shit, too. Well, arguably it was prettybadbeforealready. When I finally made that decision to get off of facebook, I started researching what information is out there to help me decide where to go. I found switching.software which has some suggestions for facebook, and it confirmed my initial hunch to simply use Mastodon again.
I wanted to have a new profile though, separate from my existing tech and politics focused social media account. But which server to pick? This time I chose to host my own instance, not out of necessity, but out of curiousity. I also had a domain for that lying around already. How easy would it be? Using masto.host it turned out to be as easy as signing up for just about any subscription service (e.g. video streaming) and it costs around 7 EUR a month including tax. I wouldn’t even have needed that domain I had lying around, but it is a nice gimmick, and great to have that option for personalization. The lowest tier would already be enough to have family and maybe some friends join, if I would ever want to go down that path. I’ll probably dedicate a separate post to how I set up that server because while technically this was incredibly easy to do, there are legal considerations to take into account along with personal safety concerns that need to be addressed as well, I am living in Germany and would have to provide an Impressum.
Anyways, I could have just establish a second friends-, family-, and hobby focused social media account on another e.g. German speaking Mastodon server, so all that additional complexity is just me nerding out.
If I were to suggest friends and family to take the plunge and get off of facebook, I would simply suggest to look for city or district themed server built around a local community to start out with. Examples would be
If I want a narrower focus, I could also join a community around special interesst topis. As a Dungeons and Dragons / pen & paper roleplaying person, I might look at dice.camp (international / english) or rollenspiel.social (german).
If instead I really can’t get enough of tech topics, I might pick hachyderm.io for a tech related community, or indieweb.social, which as already mentioned above is my current home base.
And if I can’t decide at all, I could just go with a generic instance. Mastodon.social comes to mind, but it is regarded by many as much too big already. social.vivaldi.net from the Vivaldi Browser folks might be a good alternative. In the end it does not matter that much, because a) you will need to curate your network by following (connecting with) the people you care about, and b) you can move servers and take your connections with you, if you don’t like it or your interests change. (Oh, and while you’re at it, why don’t you switch from Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox to Vivaldi? 😉)
For an Instagram replacement I would simply suggest pixelfed.social for an english / international community, and pixelfed.de for a mostly german speaking community.
For replacing WhatsApp, I would suggest to go with Signal for now.
If you are curious what else you might want to replace, go ahead and discover more on switching.software.
The actual difficult part of moving off of facebook, Instagram or WhatsApp is convincing your friends and family to come with you. A few might be already enough though to bootstrap something magical, which might in turn attract more of your friends and family. You can make it easier for them, and you can make the experience worthwhile by actively contributing to the community, and shaping it.
We need to get out of that passive consumer mindset.
Start creating, keep shaping. And don’t forget to live your life.
