Social media has come to play an important role in our society. It's a way for people to get news and to discuss it with their peers as well as a tool for education. For better or worse, social media has become an invaluable tool and an integral part of our society.

It's important to remember who owns corporate platforms and whose interests they ultimately represent. These are not neutral and unbiased channels that allow for the free flow of information. The content on these sites is carefully curated. Views and opinions that are unpalatable to the owners of these platforms are often suppressed, and sometimes outright banned.

Some examples include Facebook banning antifascist pages[1] and Twitter banning left-wing accounts during the midterm elections in US[2]. When the content that the user produce does not fit with the interests of the platform then it often gets removed and communities end up being destroyed.

Another problem is that user data constitutes a significant source of revenue for corporate social media platforms. The information collected about the users, and it can reveal a lot more about the individual than most people realize. It's possible for the owners of the platforms to identify users based on the address of the device they're using, see their location, who they interact with, and so on. This creates a comprehensive profile of the person along with the network of individuals whom they interact with. This information is often shared with the affiliates of the platform as well as government entities.

It's clear that commercial platforms do not respect user privacy, nor are the users in control of their content. Users are just a product that the owners of the platform sell to their actual customers who mine personal data.

Platforms like Lemmy and Mastodon are developed in the open making it possible to tell how they work internally. These platforms explicitly avoid tracking users and collecting their data. Not only are these platforms better at respecting user privacy, they also tend to provide a better user experience without annoying ads, analytics, and other garbage.

Another interesting aspect of the Fediverse is that it promotes collaboration. Traditional commercial platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube have no incentive to allow users to move data between them. They directly compete for users in a zero sum game and go out of their way to make it difficult to share content across them. This is the reason we often see screenshots from one site being posted on another.

On the other hand, a federated network that's developed in the open and largely hosted non-profit results in a positive-sum game environment. Users joining any of the platforms on the network help grow the entire network.

Having many different sites hosted by individuals was the way the internet was intended to work in the first place, it's actually quite impressive how corporations took the open network of the internet and managed to turn it into a series of walled gardens. Only when we own the platforms that we use will we be free to post our thoughts and ideas without having to worry about them being censored or manipulated by corporate interests.

No matter how great a commercial platform might be, sooner or later it's going to either disappear or change in a way that doesn't suit you because companies must constantly chase profit in order to survive. This is a bad situation to be in as a user since you have little control over the evolution of a platform.

On the other hand, open source has a very different dynamic. Projects can survive with little or no commercial incentive because they're developed by people who themselves benefit from their work. Projects can also be easily forked and taken in different directions by different groups of users if there is a disagreement regarding the direction of the platform. Even when projects become abandoned, they can be picked up again by new teams as long as there is an interested community of users around them.

It's time for people to get serious about owning our tools and start using communication platforms built by the people and for the people. Let's get back to making the internet work the way it was intended to work.

[1] https://theintercept.com/2020/08/20/facebook-bans-antifascis...

[2] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/twitter-political-account-ba...