juggalojedi:

Everybody jumping ship from one centralized, privately-owned service to another.  You got kicked off LJ, you got kicked off FF, you’re getting kicked off Tumblr, and still you do not see.

Until you own the service you host on, you will never be safe.  As long as you continue to use services owned by someone else, this will keep happening, as the Elder Gods of Capitalism devour one site after another.

The only hope for free expression is federation – social networks that have emphasis on the “network,” where you join one server but can follow and talk to people on any server.  It’s just like email – you might have a live.com address but you can still send mail to gmail or yahoo or your work email or even to your friend who set up their own email.  If you don’t like your email provider’s terms, if they ban LGBT content or platform Nazis, you can leave and still keep in touch with all your friends.

Two of the most prominent federated social networks are:

Mastodon (https://joinmastodon.org) – a microblogging platform like Twitter, Mastodon has a relatively large user base and hundreds if not thousands of instances.  You want to hang with some anarchists?  Try https://anticapitalist.party.  Witchcraft your thing?  There’s https://witches.live.  Star Trek fan?  https://tenforward.social.  Or you can join one of the big general-purpose instances.  Or join a bunch!  Doesn’t matter, you can talk to and follow any other Mastodon user on any other instance.

Diaspora (https://diasporafoundation.org) – Imagine if Tumblr and Facebook had a baby.  Now stop, because this is a good Christian website now.  Anyway, the baby is Diaspora – it’s a large federated social network with over three hundred instances.  It supports rich text, photos, videos, all the goodies you have here on Tumblr.  You can follow people or tags and you can control your audience – if you only want certain people to see certain posts, you can do that.

These are the big ones but there are a bunch of others (Friendica, Hubzilla, Pleroma, etc).  The thing that makes all of them great is that, like an email account, if you don’t like the instance you’re on or it ends up disappearing, you can pretty seamlessly switch to another instance and maintain your friends and contacts.  And as a plus, there’s a strong leftist presence in these spaces, and leftist instances tend to block Nazis and TERFs, no questions asked.

Anyway if you’re thinking of leaving Tumblr, instead of heading to pillowfort or displease or (Gods forbid) birdsite, please consider trying out one of the federated alternatives.  The more people who make the switch, the better the experience will be.  Thanks for coming to my TED talk.