Non-commercial Social Networks

You can only get Facebook from Meta. You can only get YouTube from Google. But what about email, and your mobile phone? You can pick your provider for those.

If you want to stop making Meta, Google, and other companies like that richer just by using their services where they sell ad space, you can also pick your provider for similar social networks that aren't owned by a single company. For example...

You can pick your Mastodon provider for a social network similar to Twitter ("X").
You can pick your PeerTube provider for a platform like YouTube.
You can pick your BookWyrm provider for a book-focused site like Goodreads.

And, the "magic" of ActivityPub makes many of those things work together, so you could create a Mastodon account and follow someone on PeerTube or BookWyrm or any other ActivityPub-powered site.

Can you use your X account to follow someone on Goodreads or YouTube? Yeah, didn't think so.

When you use single-provider services, they convert your attention there into ad dollars. Guess what doesn't happen on Mastodon, PeerTube, BookWyrm, etc.? Yep — you're not making anyone rich just by using those things. (Donations to your provider are often welcome, though!)

Home is where the heart is.