Improve Your Social Media and Build Resilient Communities

Commercial social media platforms represent one of the biggest source of data exploitation. Facebook, Instagram, Threads, TikTok, and X all exploit their users' data to generate billions in profit every year. By staying active on these platforms, we continue to feed the beast and indirectly support this invasion of privacy rights.

Here's how you can minimize your presence on commercial social media, and slowly build more autonomous communities:

Why it's important to move away

Moving away from large commercial platforms can be a complex process, but it's a very important one nonetheless.

Reducing our dependence on Big Tech, including for social media platforms, is essential in our fight for better privacy rights.

Not only this allows us to stop feeding a surveillance machine that grows ever hungry for data every month, but it gives us an opportunity to build much more resilient communities, and support platforms that aren't devouring peoples' privacy.

Many are reluctant to quit commercial social media, despite the many issues that have only become worse in the past few years. It's not always easy to leave a place that feels like home and rebuild elsewhere. However, when the house is on fire, it's time to leave.

The more we produce content, and the more we engage with our community on these privacy-invasive platforms, the more we contribute to sustain these predatory corporations making money and thriving at the expense of our followers' data.

It's a responsibility for any privacy advocates to stay true to their values, and minimize their presence on exploitive platforms as much as feasible.

Here are a few things you can start doing to reduce your contribution to Big Tech social media. This is presented on an escalating scale. Go as far as realistically possible for your situation:

Create an account that mirrors your regular posts on a privacy-respecting platform, and announce it prominently on your commercial social media accounts.
Regularly post on your commercial social media that you don't support this platform and encourage your followers to meet you on your new privacy-respecting social network instead.
Use your commercial social media profile pictures and banners to advertise your new social network account (this will help fight potential Big Tech censorship of text posts promoting competitors).
Tell your followers on commercial social media that you will stop engaging in replies here, but will reply to questions and comments on your new social network profile, and follow through.
If this makes sense for your situation, after backing up your data, start deleting older content from your commercial social media profiles (you can use a tool like Cyd to help you with deletion).
Gradually decrease your posting activity on commercial social media, and increase your presence and engagement with your new social network account on a privacy-respecting platform.
Stop posting on your commercial social media account entirely. Only keep a pinned post and profile description with your new social network account information, and encourage your followers to meet you there.
When you are ready, delete your data and close your accounts on commercial social media entirely. Before leaving permanently, make sure to post an announcement (a week before maybe) about why you are leaving and how your followers can find you on your new social network.

Embracing privacy-respectful alternatives

Perhaps you are already convinced to leave exploitive social media platforms for better places, but aren't sure where to go. Thankfully, there are alternatives that genuinely respect users and their privacy.

One such network is the Fediverse, a decentralized collection of interconnected applications and servers that can communicate with each other.

The Fediverse was built from a desire for social connection, not from greed for profits. This is a fundamental difference that leads to substantial benefits. Most servers that are part of the Fediverse network are hosted by volunteers who simply want to support their communities.

There are many applications that can connect to the Fediverse, the most famous probably being the microblogging platform Mastodon. But you could also choose to join an app more similar to Instagram with Pixelfed, or more similar to YouTube with PeerTube. They all connect together!

Here are some resources to help you learn more about this social network, and its many applications:

Building resilient communities

If you decide to make the Fediverse-connected social network Mastodon your new home, you will be able to choose between a variety of servers (instances) to create your account.

You can also simply choose the Mastodon organization's main server mastodon.social, if you don't feel like thinking about this too much. Mastodon has a feature allowing to migrate your account from one server to another, so this isn't a permanent decision. You can always move later if you choose to (you can't move your content for now, but you can move your followers).

That being said, if you're up for a more resilient solution, one option that is truly empowering is to host your own Mastodon server (or many other applications that are part of the Fediverse family).

Self-hosting your Mastodon server of course requires more time and resources. But, if you can afford it, hosting your own server will allow you to be much more independent and genuinely own your own data.

This is the best way to build a community that is truly resilient, and billionaire-resistant.

Wikimedia has its own Mastodon instance!

As an example of an organization self-hosting its Mastodon account, the Wikimedia Foundation (the nonprofit organization hosting Wikipedia) has its own Mastodon server at wikimedia.social.

From their Wikimedia's Mastodon account on this server, you can see that the organization's official website is listed in green. This verifies the account's authenticity by linking together the website address with the Mastodon account. It's easy to do, and entirely free.

You can also see this page is visible to anyone, regardless of if they have a Mastodon account or not. This makes the information you want to share with your community much more accessible. It doesn't require your community to share any sensitive data if they prefer not to, like they would have to do to follow you on Facebook, Instagram, X, or TikTok.

Additionally, this allows you to keep full control over your profile page, regardless of social media ownership, or censorship. This is how you can build a truly resilient community for your privacy advocacy work.

Privacy Guides does this too, of course! You can follow Privacy Guides from our own self-hosted Mastodon server 💛

More resources

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