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Scruples, ROOST, and Conversation
Over on my FOSS Academic blog, I would regularly post “ASM Updates” – basically, my own roundup of stuff that caught my eye in the world of alternative social media. I think it’s appropriate to bring those posts here.
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A Brief History of Alternative Social Media Scholarship
Along with Roel Roscam Abbing, I am working on a paper, tentatively titled “What is ‘Alternative’ about Alternative Social Media?”. Our hope is to write something definitive – describing alternative social media (ASM) as an object and offering advice to those who wish to study it.
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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.
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Ride the Mastodon Out of the Walled Garden
by Rusty
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New Collections and Possible Directions
By Diana G. Zulli
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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:
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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.
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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
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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,
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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The Need for Social Media Alternatives
Robert W. Gehl, Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Utah
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