The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

A Renewed SocialMediaAlternatives.org

Welcome to the new Social Media Alternatives website! This is now the home of the Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers, an international network of scholars who study ASM.

While the site gets a refresh, there are some things that are going to stay. Key among them is the S-MAP: the archive of screenshots of alternative social media.

I’ve also kept many of the old Wordpress blog posts – you can still find them here.

Finally, we’re keeping the bibliography, based on a corresponding Zotero library. That bibliography is growing, growing, growing – just as alternative social media is.

The biggest change is the network of researchers – see the members page for details on the ASM researchers. This is what I am personally most excited about: this area of research was rather lonely back when I started around 2010. But now? Now there are excellent researchers from around the world studying systems such as the fediverse, Scuttlebutt, Bluesky, and so much more.

Take a look around and keep your eyes on this space: things are happening!

Ride the Mastodon Out of the Walled Garden

by Rusty

NB: This is a cross-post from the Rhizomatix blog, a blog that can be found as a Tor Hidden Service [onion link] as well as a Gopher page [Gopher link]. That’s right – an old school Gopher Page! The post was written by Rusty, and was promoted on scholar.social, an academic-oriented instance of Mastodon, a Twitter alternative. Rusty kindly let me repost it here on the S-MAP. It is part primer to Mastodon, part retrospective on one person’s engagement with that system, and part critique of Mastodon; great material for the S-MAP. Some of it has been edited for clarity.

[Also, let me promote the S-MAP’s extensive collection of Mastodon instance terms of service and sign up screens for study.]

Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat. For many folks, these names are synonymous with the internet. For many teenagers and adults, not actively using these big tech platforms would create the eerie sensation that you don’t exist. And that’s a real problem. We invest so much of our identities in platforms that see us as data points to be studied & marketed. The crux here is the user’s lack of control. Popular social media platforms function as “walled gardens,” or restricted zones in which the company controls how the platform functions & all the data is archived on centralized servers.

New Collections and Possible Directions

By Diana G. Zulli

We are happy to announce that over the last two months, the S-MAP has doubled in size. We have added mobile versions to the Imzy, Ello, and Voat collections. More notable is the addition of a new collection Mastodon instances. Here’s what we’ve been up to:

• More of Imzy, including mobile: Founded out of Salt Lake City, Utah, Imzy is marketed as a “friendlier” alternative to Reddit and is designed to support positive interactions among niche communities. Unfortunately, Imzy recently shut down, so we are fortunate to have captured the mobile versions of this site while still available.

• Mobile shots of Ello: Ello functions as an alternative to Pinterest and provides a space for users to showcase art, fashion, and photography. Ello interactions extend to hiring opportunities, shopping, and creative collaborations, all of which are available through the app.

• Mobile shots of Voat: Voatify, the corresponding app for the social networking site Voat, is also similar to Reddit. Voatify houses a collection of themed categories, termed “subverses,” and is popular for its no censorship policy.

• Mastodon collection, including instance rules: Mastodon is a federated, open-source social networking site that values small communities and bottom-up site moderation. Mastodon’s user experience is similar to Twitter, where users can post short messages and interact with each other. Unlike Twitter, Mastodon users join volunteer-led “instances” or communities. Each Mastodon instance reflects a distinct community with rules and privacy policies unique to that instance. The S-MAP now houses both the desktop and mobile versions of several Mastodon instances, as well as dozens of collected rules pages.

In total, the S-MAP had added nearly 300 items to the above collections. Specific items include site/app descriptions, user reviews, sign-up processes, privacy and user policies, and site interfaces.

Since the items on the S-MAP include a wide range of topics, we are confident the S-MAP will be useful for a variety of teaching, research, and methodological objectives. Potential directions include:

• Teaching:
  • The ethical considerations of information sharing/data gathering online
  • Alternative social media sites as a business
  • Privacy and censorship in alternative media
• Research:
  • The nature of online communities
  • How the interfaces of alternative social media sites construct user behavior compared to more mainstream social media sites (e.g., posting behavior, viewing behavior, construction of appropriate topics, community formation).
  • The ideological construction of site values/priorities. That is, how site descriptions, instructions, and policies promote different beliefs or values.
  • How the notion of “alternative” is inscribed into each site’s interface and design
• Methodological Perspectives:
  • Platform Studies (e.g., exploring interfaces, social media architecture, and how these systems can be modified)
  • Textual of Content Analyses (e.g., analyzing/comparing the material realities of each site)
  • Visual Analyses (e.g., analyzing compositional elements of site images to see how they work in relation to a broader system of meaning)

We are excited by the growth of the S-MAP and hope to include more content in the near future. Contact us if you draw on our collections!

S-MAP update

Subtle update to the site: we now have SSL. You can browse the site at http://socialmediaalternatives.org, rather than the unencrypted www.socialmediaalternatives.org.

New Collections: The Dark Lair and Imzy

We have two new collections in the S-MAP: The Dark Lair, which is a Tor-based social networking site, and Imzy, which is based in our home state of Utah. The latter is especially notable. Here’s our description of it:

Founded by ex-Reddit employee Dan Comas in 2016, Imzy is a social networking site dedicated to fostering civil communication among members. It is largely organized around topical groups. Members can join various groups based on what they are interested in. A key innovation in Imzy is the ability for a single user to have multiple pseudonyms associated with her/his account; these pseudonyms can be linked to specific groups, giving the user multiple identities across the site. Moreover, the site allows users to post anonymously, as well. The business model of Imzy is based on tipping: members can give each other monetary tips for their content, and Imzy takes a percentage. As of this writing, Imzy will not allow for advertising. The site’s headquarters is in Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Need for Social Media Alternatives

Julie and I have a new article, a short piece in Democratic Communiqué, on the need for alternative social media. It’s a paper that explains some of the reasons why we’re building the S-MAP. It also calls on media justice organizations, including the publisher of Democratic Communiqué, to start using alternative social media systems (such as Twister or GNU social) as part of their larger media practices. After all, we want democratic media, and we’re not as likely to get it with corporate social media.

Speaking of building the S-MAP, we’ve had a relatively quiet summer, but we will be adding more materials to the site over the coming months. A new addition is the bibliography – we expect that will grow as more attention is paid to alternative social media. If you have suggestions for academic articles that explore alternative social media, let us know. Another new addition to the S-MAP will happen soon – we’re going to pay for a certificate and offer an HTTPS connection (please be patient – this takes money to do, after all!).

Going back to Democratic Communiqué, in addition to our short article, there are other pieces relevant to alternative media broadly. First, Sandra Jeppson has a longer research article on “alternative media power.” Second, there’s a review of S-MAP Advisory Board member Victor Pickard’s fantastic book America’s Battle for Media Democracy.

People need a place to share and debate things without fear of prosecution: An Interview with Kyle Farwell and Keefer Rourke of Tokumei.co

by Julie Snyder-Yuly

Why is creating a totally anonymous blogging site important? Why would someone want to be involved in a site like this? I had the opportunity to interview Kyle Farwell and Keefer Rourke, the two high school student creators of Tokumei, an anonymous microblogging platform (see it in the S-MAP).  In this interview, they talk about their background and interest in software and websites, the importance of anonymity, and explain what Tokumei.co is.

JSY: Your website says that Tokumei is run by two broke high school students. Are you still in high school? Also, who is your partner, and how long you have been working together?

Kyle: We’re still in high school. We’ll be studying computer science university next year. I’m building Tokumei with Keefer Rourke. We met in elementary school. Keefer’s been helping out with design and usability decisions since shortly after I started working on Tokumei in November. He’ll be contributing front-end code starting after exams in a couple weeks.

JSY: Tell me a little bit about yourselves and what got you interested in writing and maintaining software and websites.

Kyle: My dad introduced me to video games when I was way too young, and it all went downhill from there. I started learning Logo and Scratch when I was 8 or so, took Visual Basic and Java game development classes at 10-14, and have substituted socialization and real hobbies for programming throughout my spare time ever since. I don’t like playing games much anymore, but I still write some. I started doing web development at some point, probably thanks to VB and Java turning me off from everything else. Thankfully I discovered werc and have been working with it lately to bring sanity to the web.

Keefer: I’ve been fascinated with computers for as long as I can remember, when I was little I would always tinker with things but later discovered I didn’t have the hardware resources to do. I turned to software, figured out how text could have so much more meaning. I started with Python as most young programmers do, switched to web development, followed up with C/C++, and then discovered a large interest in mathematics. Over the last few years I’ve written stuff varying from funny scripts to intense algorithms work.

JSY: What is Tokumei, and how does it work?

Keefer: Tokumei is a simple, anonymous microblogging platform. You visit the site, you read posts, maybe follow some tags so you can keep up with your interests. Posting is easy, you hit a button, type stuff, tag it, and leave it for others. We don’t record your IP address or any other personal information with your post, so you can speak freely without fear of your post being linked back to you.

JSY: What was your motivation behind creating Tokumei?

Kyle: I’ve enjoyed anonymous discussion on sites like 8chan and my own werc-based message board werchan, but comparing them one day to popular social networks it occurred to me that anonymous discussion platforms have gone largely unchanged since 1999 and 2channel. 2ch needs a massive posting guide, and even I screw up formatting syntax on my own message board to this day. I decided to make the real discussion and honesty that anonymity provides accessible.

That, and Twitter pissed me off by requiring a phone number to register.

JSY: Why is creating an anonymous blogging site important to you, and why do you think that anonymity is so important to many social media users?

Kyle: There are two benefits of anonymity. The first is obvious but important: people need a place to share and debate things without fear of prosecution or of being fired for holding unpopular opinions. Edward Snowden wouldn’t have been able to disclose information about the NSA’s illegal spying programs safely with the anonymity provided by Tor.

The second advantage of anonymity is that it allows real discussion. In traditional social networks, people who are famous in real life and who have used the site for a long time amass the most followers. When all information is treated equally, only an interesting post or an accurate argument works.[pullquote]The second advantage of anonymity is that it allows real discussion. In traditional social networks, people who are famous in real life and who have used the site for a long time amass the most followers. When all information is treated equally, only an interesting post or an accurate argument works.[/pullquote] The first benefit of anonymity can be provided by Tor paired with a simple pseudonym on most social media sites (except some like Facebook and Twitter which demand real identities), but Tokumei is almost alone in delivering the second with forced anonymity for every post. In other words, a pseudonym separates a user from their real identity, but true anonymity separates a user’s posts from each other.

2channel founder Hiroyuki Nishimura explained anonymous posting well in an interview with Japan Media Review. When asked why he used perfect anonymity for 2channel, Nishimura said:

Because delivering news without taking any risk is very important to us. There is a lot of information disclosure or secret news gathered on Channel 2. Few people would post that kind of information by taking a risk. Moreover, people can only truly discuss something when they don’t know each other.

JSY: Who is your target audience for Tokumei, and why do you target them? Do you have any idea of how many users you have for this site?

Kyle: There are some groups that need anonymity like activists and whistleblowers, but I think it does good for everyone. The Tor Project maintains a good list of some people who benefit from anonymity.

Since we don’t store any logs, we have no idea how many users we have. All we know is that there are currently 321 posts and 512 replies.

JSY: You are a member of the Free Software Foundation. What is it and how did you become involved?

Kyle: The FSF is a nonprofit started by Richard Stallman with the goal of promoting software freedom. Free Software is software that can be used, modified, and redistributed freely. Users can share Free Software, study its source code, and make improvements freely. When software is not free, it can hide malware and create vendor lock-in.

Tokumei is Free Software (under the ISC license), so anyone can host their own site with their own rules and improvements.

I learned about the Free Software Foundation through the GNU project’s relentless insistence that it’s “GAHNOO SLASH LOONIX”, not “Linux”.

Keefer: I found out about it from Kyle.

“All software sucks, be it open-source [or] proprietary. The only question is what can be done with particular instance of suckage, and that’s where having the source matters.”        — viro

JSY:  Have you had much success in your request for code or donations? What are your plans for the code and donations?

Kyle: No, so far we haven’t received any contributions. For now this isn’t a big deal; the two of us can handle code (slowly) and we have some free credit for hosting through DigitalOcean’s and Amazon’s student programs. The current server is somewhat slow and if we see an increase in traffic we may need donations to cover an upgrade.

Our plans are pretty straightforward: code contributions will be reviewed and merged; and monetary donations will go to hosting and (if they exceed what is needed for hosting) advertising.

JSY: What are the biggest challenges you face in maintaining this site?

Kyle: One time Hacker News drove our CPU load up to like 3500% and most requests timed out for a while, but adding caching fixed it and made the site about seven times faster.

JSY: Your rules for the site are very simple – nothing that violates local or Canadian law. Have you had any problems enforcing this?

Kyle: We have a simple system in place for people to report illegal content in posts, but so far no one has used it to report anything. Should we ever receive a request, the plan is simply to verify that the post it refers to is illegal in Canada and delete it. We don’t store any information about posters so we can’t help law enforcement identify users. Our rules say you can’t post things that violate local law (law where the poster lives) but since we don’t track users’ locations we won’t typically be able to enforce it unless Canada has a similar law.

Our location is the biggest barrier to offering a good platform for free speech. Unfortunately, Canada has harsh limitations on free speech, and service providers (us) are responsible for user-generated content so we have to delete potentially illegal content as soon as possible after seeing it rather than waiting for a court order.

Rules offend me, so our rules are as simple as possible. It’s absurd that most social networks disallow things like offensive comments. I love being offended; makes me think. See this video for more.

“I like offending people, because I think people who get offended should be offended”        — Linus Torvalds

JSY: What are your future plans or goals with Tokumei? Do you see it growing or developing in any particular direction?

Kyle: To start, world domination.

Keefer: That was a joke (I hope).

Kyle: I have no idea whether or not Tokumei will grow at all. I like it personally, but I’m a bit biased. 2channel has been very successful as an anonymous forum in Japan, and 4chan to an extent in the west. As their traffic drops and Internet users become unable to navigate forms with more than two fields or think up messages longer than 140 characters, maybe Tokumei is what people want. Or maybe with increasing surveillance and political correctness, anonymity is dead.

Keefer: Direction-wise, social networks are doing some interesting things lately. Polls, livestreams, current event summaries, and so on. My tech teacher almost solely relies on Twitter for his news. The trouble is that most of these fancy things actually hand-pick news they think is important to determine what you should see and censor what you shouldn’t. Their usefulness is subjective to an audience that is content with being told what to do, what to see, what to act on. Hopefully Tokumei has a place in reducing algorithmic bias in politics and news.

Two new collections in the S-MAP: Voat.co and Ello

Two new collections are now available: Voat and Ello. Voat is an alternative to Reddit. As their About page puts it,

No legal subject in this universe should be out of bounds. Our aim is to build a site that serves the needs and wants of our users; one that strives for quality over quantity, and doesn’t pander to the lowest common denominator in return for traffic.

Ello is pretty famous as a social media alternative that promises never to sell user attention to advertisers. According to their manifesto:

We believe a social network can be a tool for empowerment. Not a tool to deceive, coerce, and manipulate — but a place to connect, create, and celebrate life.

You are not a product.

Both collections are now available, with more new collections in store for 2016!

The S-MAP is growing!

Just a bit of an update: Julie and I are adding more and more alternative social media sites to the S-MAP every week! Diaspora, of course, has been documented. Ello is on the way.

Those two are of course pretty well known. Lesser-known projects we’ve documented include Sone (the social network that runs on Freenet) and Evergreen (a social network proposed for Freenet).

We’re continually watching for more. I hear from people across ASM (on Twister, especially) about projects to add. If you have suggestions, please let us know.

Clear and Pixelated

Those of you visiting the S-MAP archive might notice a discrepancy: some of the screenshots are pixelated, and some are not. Specifically, some shots have profile pictures and names pixelated or blurred, and some do not. You might wonder: what gives?

The answer is: I’m trying to respect people’s implicit privacy  concerns. I’ve come up with a set of rules regarding this:

• If the site in question is open – that is, you can see content just by going to its URLs without having to log in, then there is no need to pixelate. The people posting there are doing so publicly.
• If the site hides content behind a login page, then the members there have an expectation of privacy. Even if they use pseudonyms, they still likely don’t want their posts or avatars made available in the S-MAP.
• If the site is open but is hosted on the Dark Web (i.e., it’s a Tor hidden service or an Eepsite), then the members likely care about their privacy and their avatars and posts ought to be pixelated.
• It goes without saying that if the content is hosted on the Dark Web and there is a log in wall, the expectation of privacy is really, really high.

Since the goal of the S-MAP archive is to get screenshots to show site interface structure, the content the users are creating is not the focus. If any  researcher wanted to learn about the culture  or contents of these sites, the S-MAP won’t help – going to the site and spending a lot of time on it is the best course. Therefore, I believe it’s less important to display user names or avatars if there is any indication site members don’t want that information public.

Planting the S-MAP's Fair Use Flag

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.

Twitter Doesn't Have My Interests in Mind: An Interview with Carol Nichols of rstat.us

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.

RWG: Tell me the basic background on rstat.us. How did it come about? Who came up with the idea? How were others recruited for involvement?

Nichols: I wasn’t involved in the initial frenzied few weeks that got rstat.us to its MVP, but from what I understand, Steve Klabnik and some of his friends in Pittsburgh were inspired/incited by the dickbar (that’s the term of endearment that the Twitter QuickBar earned).  Most of the frustration about the dickbar was the feeling that these were YOUR tweets, and the tweets of YOUR friends, but Twitter had control over how you interacted with those and could assert that control to do whatever they wanted at any time. Twitter has done a number of things its users aren’t happy about since then, and every time rstat.us got a bit of attention.

Steve Klabnik is kind of a big deal in certain circles on the internet, so rstat.us’s initial popularity was mostly due to his publicizing it. His circles are mainly other open source programmers, and since rstat.us is open source, anyone who wanted to help could just jump in. There’s an IRC room on freenode, #rstatus, where people used to coordinate and collaborate on development (it’s pretty quiet now).

I got involved because of Steve– I also live in Pittsburgh as he did at the time. I started using rstat.us and wanting it to do more, so I started submitting code. Eventually, Steve and most of his friends got tired of working on it, and as I was the only person really working on it at that point, Steve decided to give control of the rstat.us domain to me. I tried to label well-defined, smallish issues in github as “Pick me!!!” to help people who wanted to contribute but didn’t know what to work on.

I can’t remember anyone doing any formal recruitment; it was all pretty organic.

RWG: Rstat.us is open source. Why is that important?

[pullquote]Anyone can take the code and modify it to do something else if they disagree with any decision we’ve made. Anyone can read the code before they run it to verify that it isn’t doing anything they don’t want it to do. And now that we’ve all kind of burnt out on it, if anyone else wanted to continue where we left off (or simply learn from our attempt), they can.[/pullquote]

Nichols: It’s important that rstat.us is open source because at any time, anyone can take the code of rstat.us and run their own social network with it. Anyone can take the code and modify it to do something else if they disagree with any decision we’ve made. Anyone can read the code before they run it to verify that it isn’t doing anything they don’t want it to do. And now that we’ve all kind of burnt out on it, if anyone else wanted to continue where we left off (or simply learn from our attempt), they can.

RWG: How is rstat.us related to Twitter?

Nichols: rstat.us implements Twitter OAuth so that you can sign into rstat.us using your Twitter account instead of creating a new account on rstat.us, if you want. If you do that, you can also syndicate your posts from rstat.us to Twitter so that you can post both places at once. We can’t pull any content from Twitter back into rstat.us though, since that’s against their TOS and/or API restrictions. rstat.us also pretty clearly inspired by Twitter.

RWG: So if we can cross-post from rstat.us to Twitter, why do we need rstat.us? Why not just use Twitter?

Nichols: Yeah, and I’m as guilty of staying on Twitter instead of using rstat.us as anyone. But things of various severity that sometimes make me want to stop using Twitter include:

• the ever-increasing amount of ads
• the lack of granular privacy/blocking/harassment reporting features
• the possible compliance of Twitter with law enforcement/government agencies in revealing even private account information
• weird User Interface decisions they make like the blue conversation threading
• the hostility Twitter has towards 3rd party app developers
• they’ve started putting tweets from people you don’t follow in your timeline
• they’ve stated they will start curating your timeline for you like facebook does in the near future

Especially since Twitter has gone public, and really since they started taking VC, it’s to be expected that they will always be making changes that will make them the most money, not those that will make their users the most happy and safe.

RWG: I’d like you to elaborate a bit on this. What is your take on the evolution of Twitter? How has it changed  over time? How have those changes affected its value to end users?

Nichols: I was just listening to an NPR Marketplace segment on the stock prices of Twitter and Facebook and things that are affecting it, and they talked about how Twitter is being judged on their Monthly Active User count, which is a measure of how many people are seeing ads on the site. And it’s just so depressing. I use Twitter to keep in touch with friends, to keep up with things happening in the open source software world and the world at large, and to make new connections with people I wouldn’t otherwise meet. So my measurements of whether Twitter is working well for me are not aligned at all with Twitter’s measurements. They don’t have my interests in mind at all.

However, the network effects are making it difficult for me to move to using rstat.us instead of Twitter all the time, since if no one I know is using an rstat.us-compatible tool, I can’t get the things I want there either.

[pullquote]I know once you get a user base the size of Twitter’s, you’re never going to make everyone happy, but it seems like now they’re actively ignoring the needs of their users in order to serve the needs of their advertisers and shareholders.[/pullquote]

I wasn’t on Twitter in its very early days, but from what I’ve heard, the service evolved a lot because of how the users shaped it: retweets and hashtags were something users started doing on their own, and THEN the service started native retweets that wouldn’t use more characters and linking hashtags. I know once you get a user base the size of Twitter’s, you’re never going to make everyone happy, but it seems like now they’re actively ignoring the needs of their users in order to serve the needs of their advertisers and shareholders.

I’ve been lucky enough to not experience massive harassment on Twitter, but their current way of handling threats made on their service is unacceptable and they don’t seem interested in fixing it. I don’t see people, especially women, staying there too much longer if it continues to be so easy to harass people without consequences (and in fact several women I know have recently left or taken their account private). Not that I have perfect solutions for rstat.us, but it seems like Twitter isn’t even trying.

RWG: How is work on rstat.us organized? How do people decide who contributes what?

Nichols: Right now, not much of anyone is contributing anything, unfortunately. I mentioned the “Pick me!!” github label above– we also have “In progress” if someone is currently working on a feature or bug, and a few other topics to help people find things they’d be interested and able to do.

When many people were actively developing, we had a few policies:

• No one merges their changes directly into the master branch– everyone must submit a pull request and another committer has to do a code review and merge it for you.
• If you have had one pull request accepted, you became a committer with push access to the repository– this means you could code review other people’s pull requests.
• Only a very limited number of people could deploy code to the version running at http://rstat.us or access the production database– it was just Steve for a while, then just me, and now it’s just wilkie.

Other open source projects are more centralized– they have one or a small number of maintainers/owners who are the only ones able to merge a pull request into the master branch. I really like the way we went about doing it– it gave people a sense of ownership really early on and we had a few people who were really helpful about reviewing other people’s work so that we didn’t have a bottleneck of only a few people able to do that. The nature of git is such that no one could really do irreparable damage with these privileges.

RWG: Up until recently, rstat.us was overrun by spambots. How did this happen? Was this expected? Did you try to prevent it?

Nichols: I think we’re in some SEO tool(s) that post links– I just did some looking into it and rstat.us was on some lists of “instant approval, dofollow links” sites to post to for SEO purposes.

We totally should have expected this, since spambots seem to try submitting any form on the Internet these days. We didn’t start thinking about handling until it was already a pretty high volume. If you were signed in and only looking at the list of updates from people you follow, it wasn’t very noticeable– but the homepage with the latest updates from all accounts became all spam, all the time.

As an all-volunteer team, we definitely didn’t have the time to go around banning accounts or sift through reports of spam. And, really, the goal was never to make http://rstat.us a high-quality destination site in itself– we wanted people to be running the rstat.us codebase themselves, in which case you only need 1 account. So we ended up recently deleting all posts from http://rstat.us, disabling signups, and having an option to disable signups after the first user is created for anyone running their own node.

A bunch of our discussions about this on github: here, here, and here.

RWG: How do you think about rstat.us and any potential intellectual property issues you might have as you make a Twitter alternative? Are you concerned about Twitter suing rstat.us for copying any aspects of its functionality or design? How do you think about the legal aspects of your project?

Nichols: We’ve been really careful not to violate Twitter’s TOS, even in gray areas. I could definitely see them trying to sue us, if they decide to patent “posting text on the internet in 140 character segments” or something, which I hope wouldn’t be patentable but Amazon has one-click buying patented so who knows. We’re also a pretty nebulous organization, and we aren’t making any money from this, so I have vague hopes that this would make it not worth Twitter’s while to try and sue us, but I am not a lawyer. If they would try to sue a group including me personally, I think it would be pretty fun to go to bat over this, and I would hope organizations like the EFF would help.

As far as the legal aspects of our project in general, we’ve tried to do what we think is ethical, since a lot of our work doesn’t have relevant laws that have been tested in court yet. We changed the license from WTFPL to CC0 at some point, and did the best we could to contact all contributors when doing so, including here and here.

That’s probably the biggest legal issue we’ve dealt with so far.

I think we need more technology-aware lawyers, judges, and political representatives as more and more of our life happens on the Internet… hearing court decisions or laws and the misconceptions and conclusions they draw based on their limited knowledge makes me cringe. Like the European attempt to create a “right to be forgotten” – it sounds nice in theory, but it’s just not possible. Again, I don’t have any solutions for this though.

The Need for Social Media Alternatives

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.