Let’s offer at alternative Social Network to the people of Merri-bek

Our digital public spaces are an important part of building and practising local community. With platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter run by billionaires intent on spreading hate, it’s important that we don’t rely on them for local issued.

We’re going to setup a local social network at merri-bek.social, and we need volunteers to help make it a reality - no technical skills needed.

Why is this important now?

Social networks have been getting increasingly problematic for years, and each time there’s a fresh scandal we see a flock of people trying to move off. The trouble is, the networks effects of having all your friends somewhere means that it’s very hard to move without actively giving up social connections.

However, Facebook and Twitter in particular have been degrading the experience for users in the process known as Enshittification to such a large extent that even non-technical users can see that their feed is more ads than posts from their friend.

On the backdrop of this increasing profit extraction comes the fact that the motivations of the Billionaires who own these platforms to cause social divisiveness and promote radical views is now very much out in the open, with Elon Musk trying out Nazi solutes on stage and overseeing a 50% rise in hate speech on Twitter, and Zuckerberg removing LGBTIQ+ protections, fact checking, and telling Jo Rogan that he wanted a more masculine culture in tech.

If we’re ever going to do this, it needs to be now.

What is the alternative?

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and others are not technically very complex. There are lots of alternative platforms, some corporate run, and many free and open source. The tricky bit has never been to find a way to send text and images to your friends, it has been to find a business model that could defeat the existing monopolies with a new one.

But of course the internet doesn’t have to be this way, and didn’t used to be. Email, for example, lets you reach almost anyone, and it doesn’t matter which company hosts your email address for you.

Our goal is not to try to find a better monopolistic platform with fewer Nazis, it’s to move people to open platforms that allow communities of people to build the habit of stewarding digital common spaces together, while also being part of broader society.

At Merri-bek Tech, we believe that our best options for these are Federated open source social networking platforms. Federated platforms (aka “the Fediverse”) sit in between corporate monopolies, and totally decentralised systems. Federated platforms are run by communities (of interest, place, or whatever) in a way that they see fit, but allow people to network between communities as well.

One of the most technically mature of these is Mastodon . Mastodon is an alternative to Twitter (see a feed of writing, images and links from people and topics you follow). It’s opens source software that is developed by a non-profit foundation. Groups can use it for free to run their own servers with their own processes, conduct agreements and moderation, but people from any Mastodon server can talk to any other over an open protocol.

How would we do this?

We propose setting up a Mastodon server for the local area, at the domain merri-bek.social. The goal would be to get enough local people using it that it becomes a genuinely useful place for local conversation. Having 1,000 people would make it an interesting, while niche option, and valuable for those using it. Having 10,000 people would make it larger that local Facebook groups, and worth engaging in for local businesses, journalists, etc.

The challenges of doing this are mainly not technical. Merri-bek Tech is a local non-profit which already has technical volunteers ready to help set up the server. We need people who are interested in stewarding and promoting a new social network. This might include online support, like moderating hate speech, and real world action, like postering or running onboarding & help sessions.

We need you!

If this sounds like an important problem to you, we need you to help out. We are assembling a working group to tackle this, and we need volunteers with a range of skills, mostly non-technical ones.

If you’d like to get involved, please contact jade@merri-bek.tech