Are we awake yet? Are we finally coming to our senses regarding social media? Is it crystal clear yet that we have created our generation’s Walmart and it’s time to burn it down? Are you ready to take action and destroy the empire of capitalist billionaires that are on the brink of taking every one of our posts and uploads and feeding artificial intelligence machines to create the next generation of content? We have a golden opportunity to shut that down and take back our identities and our privacy and the answer is a collection of federated social properties that are all mostly non-profit foundations with open source indie web management teams who support data portability, RSS, open standards and are friendly to the web and with each other.
We have to get proactive.
We have to fight back.
We have to convince our parents to join federated social networks.
GASP
Yep, we gotta do it. You have to install PixelFed and Mastodon on your parents’ iPhones and you may have to follow Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan accounts because that’s the kind of people your parents are into (mine are) and you have to show them that it’s totally safe and chill outside of Instagram and Facebook. That there are people just like them swapping recipes and “owning the libs” on other networks and there are even federated servers that are more pro-free-speech than Truth Social or X and it’s all a click away with a global server feed of people that might make them laugh and share stories of the day and memes.
You have to show your parents that they do belong somewhere that isn’t a property owned by Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. They have a home elsewhere on the open web and many of these servers are completely free to join and the apps are free and they can just post away and go wild!
If you left Facebook and Twitter like I did back in 2011, congrats. Congrats. You were a total weirdo, but your time has come! If you left the networks in 2016, yeah, that was pretty smart, and I’m proud of you. If you left in 2020 after the age of AI and machine learning and censorship showed you just how stupid it was to spend all day on someone else’s server posting things that might be deleted and seeing every other post as an advertisement, yeah, you were really smart to leave them, but honestly, a little late.
If you’re still feeding these networks in 2025 with people who are literally worth half-a-trillion dollars running the show and outright promising that they’re going to:
- Never charge you and make you their customer
- Shove ads down your throat and lobby for full control of tracking everything you do to show you more relevant ads
- Use your personal data that they now own because you uploaded it to train AI models
- Exploit your data to the highest bidder
- Use their influence to sway elections, free speech, voters, companies, policy, trade
You’re completely lost.
The truth is this: social media is a drug. You will have fewer likes, favorites, replies, and reposts when you leave Instagram and join a federated network. It will be just like using social media 10-15 years ago, but that’s okay. You’ve become addicted to the caffeine drip of social media, and it’s okay to have less engagement. I’m using Micro.blog, and I’ll never know how many people follow my RSS feed or my federated posts. I don’t have a follower count. I do get replies, and that’s what matters…conversations.
It’s also going to be okay to suffer a bit by having to text someone who doesn’t use Mastodon and may have missed the news that you just had a baby. You might have to call them. My parents use Facebook, and I haven’t since 2011. I have to send them text messages or call them when things happen to me. It’s okay. They don’t mind, and they like hearing from me. My dad says he still shares things with me on Facebook despite knowing I don’t use it. He also will text me Facebook links that I can’t open…that’s okay too.
I might have better luck just getting them to join a social network that federates with Mastodon? RIGHT?!?!?!
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The nerds are using federated social networks. No one else is using this technology, and as much as I loved using Twitter in 2007 when it was just 100,000 nerds and a few weird celebrities like Ashton Kutcher and MC Hammer, Twitter never would have lasted if not for the masses. Federated social media needs to succeed to bring down the social networks. The network effects that have made Musk and Zuckerberg so insanely rich are going to continue perpetuating until we convince everyone we know to leave these networks and join a federated space.
Here’s what you do to start. Just send them to https://mastodon.social/explore and have them create an account and download the official Mastodon client and maybe follow a few topics or creators that align with their interests.
Then you engage with them on those networks, but when they click on your profile and see there’s more to it and you don’t use Mastodon.social, you can then tell them how your server is linked to theirs through a handshake. Use Facebook as an example; say to your dad, “You know how you can’t send an email to someone on Facebook and have to use Messenger? Well, with Federation, you can” and this might get them excited. They might join Micro.blog, Pixelfed, and PeerTube or Lemmy.
It’s not going to be easy, but you can maybe challenge your family to do a dry-January from the top 3 social networks and see if they can get their fill by just using federated networks.
My wife today told me she’s thinking of deleting Facebook and TikTok. I hope she does, and I look forward to having her like my posts from Micro.blog while she’s browsing Mastodon. Every single person needs to invite 10 friends to a federated network, and that’s how this grows. It’s always a little lame to bring your parents to the new hotness, but you’re doing them a favor, and it’s the only way we’re going to stop these multi-billionaire assholes from taking over our world (and neighboring worlds).