Decentralized social media
Welcome to the Fediverse
If you're looking for social media options where the user has more control, you'll find a range of options to explore in the Fediverse, including the popular Mastodon.
Despite what it may seem, despite its promise of unbridled communication possibilities and its supposed gift of giving voice to the traditionally voiceless, current social media is a walled garden at best, although a slimy cesspit with bars over the top would be a more apt description.
The problem with the current social media status quo is that the platform does not have your interests at heart. The companies that run proprietary social media platforms gradually introduce more and more restrictive terms of service, package your personal data and sell it off to other companies and governments, make their algorithms more manipulative, and so on.
In the Beginning
You could renounce social media altogether and go and live as hermit, but why throw the baby out with the bath water? The Fediverse [1] is the FOSS community's response to walled-gardened, personal data-leaching, closed, and proprietary social media. Strictly speaking, the Fediverse would cover all social media services (and some services that are not related to social media at all) that do not rely on a centralized and controlling entity (like, say, Facebook, Twitter, or Google), but instead allow a user to run their own server (often called a "pod") and to connect it to a network of similar servers to share the media between them. This allows user A to post to pod X and user B to read it from pod Y.
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