Last year, my wife, Anne, asked me to take a personality test on 16personalities.com. I ended up with an Advocate INFJ Personality, which apparently is quite rare according to the website. While it feels nice to feel so unique, trust me, the real life of having such a personality is kind of a nightmare.
"Advocates are troubled by injustice, and they typically care more about altruism than personal gain." I mean, it sounds great, but I've also spent a lot of time in misery and haven't financially done well. So, when I heard Elon Musk was going to acquire Twitter, being the person that I am, I deleted my Twitter account.
I wasn't particularly active, so there wasn't much to lose, but the question that kept bugging me was there's Parler, Truth, and now Twitter seemingly wanting to cater to the a certain segment of the population, which doesn't make much sense financially since it ultimately feel niche, where is the inverse? How come there isn't a social media Twitter clone that basically does the opposite of those platforms and does it un-apologetically?
And no, it's not META/Facebook, remember Cambridge Analytics? It's certainly not TikTok who more likely than not is proving information to the Chinese government. BTW, I'm Asian so this isn't some anti-Asian thing, it's about how governments and information work. Finally, to be honest, I don't know enough about Snapchat to give an opinion one way or the other.
The closest, from the very limited research I've done, is Mastodon. It's an open-source (wait isn't that what Elon Musk and Jack Dorsey was hoping Twitter would be), non-profit, decentralized, and from what I can tell, ad-free. Full disclosure, I have very little experience on the platform, but decentralized social media feels like the future. FYI, I never owned a single crypto in my life and never shilled it. I'm talking specifically about decentralization and social media where a single company can't influence what you see.
Don't get me wrong, there will be users and companies trying to "penetrate" the platform in hopes to "influence" users, but at least its up to individuals and communities rather than a single corporate entity deciding how to deal with it or not deal with. From what I can tell, one could set-up a server dedicated to utter misinformation and conspiracy theories, but as a user, from what I believe, you can decide to be cut off from that community. It turns out the far-right social media platform, Gab, tried to use Mastodon, but administrators and users coordinated to isolate them until they gave up and went the route of a centralized platform like Facebook.
While I can't 100% vouch for the platform since I'm so new to it, it's certainly worth a look.
