I love looking around at new, more privacy oriented and/or distributed social media sites. MeWe, Parler, Gab, Mastodon, Diaspora, Minds, Bastyon, Ruqqus, Odysee, etc. etc.

However, all these sites have a problem (well, Odysee seems to have gotten past it), and that problem is people don’t really go to these sites to socialize and share. They go to these places to vent. Usually about censorship and politics and to say/share things that would (or did) get them banned from the major social media sites. Users post all kinds of fringe news, conspiracy theories, and/or highly vitriolic memes.

I’m not saying they shouldn’t, or that such things should be disallowed (the entire point of most of these places is to allow free expression after all). The issue is, this is all they’re doing. And when a person loads up the site, for the first time, or after a while, they are inundated with nothing but this shouting into the void and ‘X DESTROYS Y’ or ‘Y PROVES Z’ style posts. Looking through all this constantly is absolutely exhausting. I can’t really help but wonder why people do this, especially on these sites which do a very good job (as all social media does) of creating perfect ideological bubbles, such that nobody on them is likely to be changing their views anytime soon, and most likely already completely agree with everything posted.

I don’t go to facebook or twitter to be inundated with politics, rants, and negative newspieces. I go there for the friends, family, cute pictures, pictures of interesting things, art, and monster doses of (nonpolitical) memes, puns, and dad jokes, interspersed with interesting nonpolitical articles. It just seems most people on these new sites… aren’t. I’m not saying Facebook and their like don’t have plenty of crazy posts (they absolutely do. Twitter is a hellhole and literally everyone knows it), but they tend to be at least mostly distributed among the more mundane things in the feed, and I even look forward to some of them.

That said, I currently really like MeWe as a replacement for facebook, and Odysee as a replacement for youtube, because they currently have the least of these problems.