Robert W. Gehl, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Utah

Welcome to the S-MAP, the Social Media Alternatives Project!

I’ve conceived of this project because of my research interests in alternative social media. That is, sites that are built due to criticisms of mainstream social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Inspired in great part by the Unlike Us network, I’ve been researching sites such as Lorea, Twister, Diaspora, Quitter, and social networks on the dark web. I’ve begun publishing this research in journals and edited collections.

However, I’ve noticed a major problem: many of these sites disappear. For example, the social network I discuss in “Power/Freedom on the Dark Web” appears to be gone forever. Previously, I wrote about TalkOpen, a Twitter alternative, which also is offline. Because I’ve saved materials about these sites in Zotero (screenshots and interviews, mainly), I realize I have a very rare record of these sites, a record that does not appear in the Internet Archive.

Thus I have decided to begin systematically archiving materials related to social media alternatives. I also intend to blog about them here. Below is my overall rationale for doing so. Please watch this site for updates, and watch my Omeka site for materials!

What are “Social Media Alternatives” and Why Are They Important?

“Social media alternatives” are software systems that allow users to engage in social media activities such as sharing digital media, commenting on media, creating personas and profiles, socializing (by following or “friending” one another), and quickly communicating across networks of strong and weak social ties. Of course, all of these activities are possible with “mainstream” social media sites such as Facebook, Google (specifically, Google+), and Twitter.

What sets social media alternatives apart is their critical stance towards those mainstream sites. The technologists and activists making social media alternatives criticize mainstream sites as privacy-invading, centralized systems that exploit user creativity, reduce interactions to consumer choices, and allow governments an easy way to monitor citizen and dissident activities. However, alternative site makers also often recognize the value of Facebook, Google, and Twitter to practices such as free speech and political debate, and so rather than refuse to engage in social media, these activists and technologists try to improve social media by making privacy-conscious, decentralized systems that allow users far more control and freedom. Examples of past and present alternatives to Facebook, Google, and Twitter include Diaspora, GNU Social, Twister, FreedomBox, and Lorea.

Such alternatives are important because they represent different ways of thinking about the core practices of social media, including what it means to be social, how media systems are organized, and questions of surveillance, intellectual property, and the media/politics relationship.

Mainstream social media sites, such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter, have had major impacts on many aspects of daily life. These sites shape how users interact, create and consume media, find out about the news, socialize, fall in love, fall out of love, or become active in politics. With billions of users on Facebook, trillions of Tweets in Twitter, and plenty of +1s in Google+, social media has incredible, global reach. In sum, mainstream social media sites have a major influence on how we think about ourselves and the world around us.

However, it is a mistake to assume that the concept of “social media” is entirely comprised of sites such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter. As humanistic scholars of science and technology studies (STS) have shown, there is nothing inevitable about the current technological systems we engage with. In every instance of technological change, things could have been different, and had they been, our very ways of thinking (at least as they are mediated by technological systems) would be different. It is critically important to explore our contemporary technological systems – including social media – with an eye towards showing how things could be otherwise. Social media alternatives provide us with more perspectives on how to “do” online social networking than we would have with only Facebook, Twitter, and Google.

Moreover, there is a growing critical literature on mainstream social media demonstrating that sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ invade user privacy and rely on constant surveillance in order to exist. Such research reveals that Facebook, Google, and Twitter are exploitative in a double sense. First, they rely on user activity to create the content that draws other users to their sites. Second, they monitor user activities – such as their likes, tweets, +1s, and other declarations – to build profiles of users that can be sold to marketers. And, in addition to contributing to marketing efforts, social media surveillance can be used by governments to spy on citizens. The Snowden leaks about about the National Security Agency (NSA) revealed that the NSA (and other government agencies) regularly seek social media data on citizens; as researchers have pointed out, to build a profile in Facebook is to build a profile that can used by a state seeking to monitor its subjects.

The builders of social media alternatives recognize the positive aspects of Facebook, Twitter, and Google; they see how people socialize in them, organize with them, and share media with them. However, social media alternative builders also are working to remove the negative elements: the constant surveillance, the invasion of privacy, potential monitoring by states, and the reduction of interaction to consumption over other ways of being, such as citizenship. Although sites such as Lorea, GNU Social, Twister, rstat.us, and Lorea aren’t as popular as mainstream social media, they are the new alternative media and are deserving of scholarly attention.

Why Create the S-MAP?

Despite the importance of the study of such alternatives, currently there is no central collection or resource dedicated to this topic. To study social media alternatives (as I have for the past three years), one has to search many locations: code repositories, academic articles in computer science and information security, myriad blogs, and the occasional news or magazine report. A curated, Web-accessible digital resource of alternative social media sites would be beneficial to scholars the world over. This is what the Social Media Alternatives Project (S-MAP) is intended for.

Social media alternatives are often developed quietly by coders, activists, and users the world over. Such sites might be stored as software in a code repository (such as Github), presented on a little-known Web site, or even exist in relative obscurity on a developer’s home computer. Moreover, social media alternatives might exist on the Web for a few years and then later disappear as developers lose funding. In any case, eventually, the knowledge and technology that comprises these alternative systems will be lost.

Documenting alternative makers’ efforts will teach us much about the historical and technological moment these alternatives developed in, including their relationships to the mainstream sites, trends in design decisions, reactions to political movements, and their use of contemporary technologies. For these reasons, computer scientists and software engineers will also value the S-MAP because it will be storehouse of software and networking design features and philosophies; this could quite possibly influence future forms of network and communication software, including new social media systems, new technical protocols, and new hardware systems. By bringing fields such as history, media studies, science and technology studies, and software engineering together, the S-MAP could function as a “boundary object” between humanities and technical fields.

What Will the S-MAP’s Benefits Be?

The S-MAP will build on my research program, which is at the intersection of critical study of social media and software studies, reflected in my recent book Reverse Engineering Social Media (Temple, 2014) and in multiple peer-reviewed publications in the field of critical social media studies.

Because there is currently no centralized archive dedicated to social media alternatives, many researchers will benefit from this project.

• Historians of media and technology would benefit because social media alternatives are often built in specific historical and technical contexts. For example, Twister, a Twitter alternative, was built during the context of the Brazilian popular protests against hosting the World Cup.
• Science and technology studies scholars would benefit because the S-MAP will show how social media can take multiple shapes. If we only study Facebook, Google, and Twitter, then we are effectively saying that social media can only exist in the form of these successful tools. The S-MAP will show different ways of thinking about social media, useful for comparative analysis.
• Software Engineers and Computer Scientists will benefit because many of the social media alternatives are complex, sophisticated technical achievements in fields such as human-computer interaction, encryption, and distributed networking protocols.
• Communication scholars will benefit because the S-MAP will document emerging and changing modes of digital communication.

Ultimately, by partnering with various institutions and with social media alternatives builders, I hope the S-MAP is a viable online resource that helps us continually rethink what “social media” means.