Over the past 2 decades social media platforms have become an all-encompassing part of our daily lives. These platforms began as a way for people to connect with friends and families via the internet, a way to share different media with your circle.

Slowly but surely all of this has changed and these platforms have transformed significantly different from the purpose they serve. Their purpose has changed to collect as much user data as possible to increase user retention as much as possible to maximize the number of adverts shown to the user to maximize revenue. The friends and family aspect of the social media has slowly gone away replaced by whatever keeps you using the platform.The collected data is also further sold to anyone with the money to buy it.

Moderation has also been a big issue with these platforms, they have shown time and time again their inability to stop the spread of misinformation, sometimes even pouring fuel over the misinformation fire dramatically increasing the spread of misinformation, which has even resulted in killings and in the case of the Rohingya a genocide [1].

While in the process of writing this, it has come out that an Israeli software maker has made a spyware that infects devices via ads, to snoop data for their customers [2].

Not only do these platforms try to keep users from leaving their platform, they have also with time added walls, which force non-members to create account with them, to gain access to information hosted on their platforms. This not only restricts access of information, it also makes them unsuitable for government organizations and other such large institutions to reliably disperse important announcements over the internet, significantly reducing the amount of people being able to access to the information which maybe necessary (Also it is incredibly irritating).

Blocking out non members from the information on the platforms also has a further negative effect, that the embedded information to a website is also blocked to non users of the social media platform, making the information which was meant to be public be limited to only the users of the platform.

These platforms also suffer with a Association problem, that is to say, that by using the platform users associate themselves with the operators of the platform as well as the users of the platform. While this may not be a problem for the average user, this can be especially problematic for large corporations, governments and other such institutions.

Fediverse: A rising alternative

Fediverse applications or more importantly the one which use ActivityPub Protocol are slowly rising and over the coming years as they mature will come to rival the biggest platforms in terms of user base, This is my personal opinion.

Why I think that?

They by fundamental design are meant to connect people as facebook/twitter(X)/Instagram promised but became something worse as time went by. This wont happen to the fediverse apps because, they are not there to generate money, show ads, nor do these apps wish to increase average time spent on them. They are simply their to connect people. They do not care whether you use them or not and enusre access to information, even for non members (this is more of a toggle, up to the operators of a instance to decide).

These Fediverse applications are also much more suitable for governments and large institutions since they provide a much finer control over moderation, verification of a person is much simpler (Say a government department will use something like a .gov domain) making it easier for people accessing the information to verify the source of the information.

For example, a self-hosted mastodon server is very suitable for a government since it allows for the information to be accessible to all, even for those without an account on the mastodon server, It is also further possible to subscribe to accounts via rss. Verification is also simple, as the handle displays the domain name of the instance. This also makes the problem of association go away as content which is illegal to a country is not available on their own isntance, and instances with such content can simply be defedrated from.

It is also significantly cheaper to host these services compared to the cumulative of verified subscriptions a large organization may be paying. This is because if you don’t track everything that the user/visitor does on the platform, like keystroke tracking, cursor location tracking[3][4], mapping the user as they surf the web, even when outside the platform and also don’t spend extensive resources on AI to increasing user retention and time spent on platform, its pretty cheap to operate such a service.

The biggest roadblock to these apps becoming platforms, is funding to operate and moderate instances. This I personally believe will be solved as people learn that, nothing is free and start paying for the services they use. To make this successful only a small percentage of users will need to fund the instance ensuring that all are able to access the application.

References

1. Amnesty International. (2022). THE SOCIAL ATROCITY: META AND THE RIGHT TO REMEDY FOR THE ROHINGYA. [online] Available at: https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/ASA16/5933/2022/en/.

2. Hardcastle, J.L. (n.d.). Probe reveals secret Israeli spyware that infects via ads. [online] www.theregister.com. Available at: https://www.theregister.com/2023/09/16/insanet_spyware/ [Accessed 18 Sep. 2023].

3. DelhiJune 12, S.G.N., June 13, 2018UPDATED: and Ist, 2018 19:43 (n.d.). Facebook confirms that it tracks how you move mouse on the computer screen. [online] India Today. Available at: https://www.indiatoday.in/technology/news/story/facebook-confirms-that-it-tracks-how-you-move-mouse-on-the-computer-screen-1258189-2018-06-12.

4. Archive, V.A., Author, E. the and feed, G. author R. (2022). Meta and TikTok can track everything you type on in-app browsers: researcher. [online] New York Post. Available at: https://nypost.com/2022/08/19/meta-and-tiktok-can-track-everything-you-type-on-in-app-browsers-researcher/.