It’s time for a Great Digital Diaspora. A Scattering, as Frank Herbert put it. Decentralize social media, self host, use VPNs and/or TOR, and for God’s sake get off of Twitter.
We know the giant social media corporations are using our posts, our thoughts to tune AI. Elmer’s glue pizza anyone? But the tracking of our digital information is leading us to a larger issue; our thoughts and acts of resistance, our ability to say what is wrong with our government is being tracked down and deleted. During the first attempt of this administration they were tripped up by the people’s ability to resist. The Internet was a huge reason for this. We organized in chats and hashtags, and they couldn’t figure out how to shut it down. Now Reddit posts critical of decisions made and agencies closed are being deleted while hashtags are owned by white nationalists. With a rejection of the rule of law, how much longer until these posts are paired with a username? An email address? An IP address? All of these can and will be used to doxx you.
There are alternatives. We are not stuck. The Exodus to Bluesky proved there is an appeal to finding better homes. The Fediverse is one such alternative. Find a home server. Still watch and read and comment and share with your community, regardless of where their home server is. Similar to email, it doesn’t matter where you find home as long as you know the other person’s address. A great write up of available home servers is available here, and an explanation of how the Fediverse is a better Internet is here.
But this is not all we can do. It’s time to put the Internet back in our hands, so we can better build our communities. Those who are either curious but aren’t ready to make huge investments should look at the Yunohost project and start self hosting. An old laptop or desktop and an external hardrive can make for a huge difference. Easy to install apps, nearly as easy as installing an app from the app store. Then offer access to your friends and neighbors. “I’m running some tools for the community if you’d like access” is enough for most folks.
We are at a crossroads. The ownership of our communities are being used against us. To offer any resistance we need to break the ownership up, put it back in our hands. No one should own your ideas outside of you. The greatest act of resistance is to protect your community.
