I’m happy to announce that my paper on the Twitter alternatives rstat.us, Twister, Quitter, and Gnu social has been accepted to the online journal Fibreculture. The paper, “Building a Better Twitter: A Study of the Twitter Alternatives Gnu Social, Quitter, Rstat.Us, and Twister
,” draws on interviews with social media alternative makers to explore the (productive) frictions that occur when the alternatives make contact with with the mainstream Twitter. I use my previous work on “critical reverse engineering” to examine four points of contact: pragmatic, genealogical, legal, and normative.

I am so grateful to the social media alternative developers who spoke to me: Matt Lee and Donald Robertson (Gnu social); Hannes Mannerheim (Quitter); Miguel Freitas (Twister); and Dave “Wilkie” Wilkinson and Carol Nichols (rstat.us). I’ve published here on the S-MAP my interview with Carol (it’s a great read — check it out), and I hope to publish more interviews with developers and users.

As the Social Media Alternatives Project starts taking shape, one of the key considerations has to be copyright and intellectual property. The S-MAP archive will be a collection of screenshots of interfaces drawn from a wide range of alternative social media. These screenshots will thus capture design elements, including navigation, structure, and logos.

We live in what Lawrence Lessig has aptly called a “culture of permission”; that is, we live in a time where we feel as if we have to ask permission to engage with media objects. Is it ok if I quote this source? Is it ok if I share this picture? Is it ok if I post a video of my kid dancing to a Prince song to YouTube?

Alternatively, however, there is another way of thinking about our use of digital media: the Fair Use approach. Fair Use, broadly speaking, is an exception in copyright law that allows for new, transformative, or critical uses of digital media. And the key to Fair Use is that we don’t have to ask permission to use such materials in these ways.

The S-MAP will thus have to be an exercise in Fair Use. I cannot seek permission from each and every alternative social media site to post screenshots of their interfaces.

To think this through a bit further, I’ve consulted with Allyson Mower of the Marriott Library at the University of Utah. Together, we used the American Library Association’s Fair Use Evaluator to assess the S-MAP’s standing as a Fair Use project. Based on this assessment, I believe that the project is on solid ground as Fair Use.

If you want to see the results of the evaluation, see this PDF document.

Why make or contribute to a Twitter alternative? What might motivate someone to work on a social media alternative? I had the good fortune of asking these and other questions to Carol Nichols, an open source software developer and longtime contributor to rstat.us, a microblogging service (see the S-MAP collection on rstat.us here, and you can read Nichols’s discussion of the rstat.us API here). In this interview, she talks about the rise of rstat.us, its organization, and its relationship to the mainstream Twitter. Continue reading Twitter Doesn’t Have My Interests in Mind: An Interview with Carol Nichols of rstat.us →

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! Continue reading The Need for Social Media Alternatives →