Organizing on decentralized social networks: a survey!

With Xitter's CEO making Nazi salutes and Meta's techbro CEO kissing the fascist boot (and censoring Black people, trans people, Muslims, and progressives on Facebook and Instragram), more and more organizers are looking for alternatives to corporate social networks. Decentralized social networks like Bluesky, Mastodon, and lesser-known like NodeBB, GoToSocial, and Mobilizon don't have all the functionality of corporate social networks, and they're not always as easy to use, but depending on what you and your group are looking for there may be some good options.

The Nexus of Privacy is planning a series of online discussions and video/phone calls focusing on organizing on decentralized social networks. There's a range of topics to cover, including looking at the tradeoffs between the different platforms for different use cases, brainstorming how organizers can leverage these platforms, easy ways to start exploring, and ways for groups to move as a whole.

At the bottom of the post, you should (hopefully) see a CryptPad survey to gauge interest and what topics we should focus on, You can fill it out anonymously; if you want to leave your contact information, we'll only use it to follow up with you on this topic (and not for anything else).

Whether or not you reply to the survey, for discussions online, you can follow

• @thenexusofprivacy@infosec.exchange on Mastodon and compatible software like Glitch, Hometown, and GoToSocial (aka the ActivityPub fediverse)
• @thenexusofprivacy.net on Bluesky
• thenexusofprivacy community on lemmy.blahaj.zone on Lemmy, Piefed, Mbin or compatible software
• The Nexus of Privacy newsletter

And if you're interested in privacy – or just want to see a decentralized social network. campaign in action – you can also follow @waprivacy@pnw.zone in the ActivityPub fediverse and/or @wa-privacy.net on Bluesky.  If you're in Washington state, you can also sign up for the Washington Privacy Organizers email list.

If you don't have an account on any of these decentralized social networks yet, no worries: just check the profiles from time to time to see updates.  If you're interested in creating an account, check out Resources for choosing the right fediverse instance.

Note: it might take the form a few seconds to load. If you have problems viewing or responding to the survey embedded on this page, here's the direct link to the CryptPad survey. If that doesn't work for you either, here's a thread with Mastodon polls, or here's a Google Forms version as well (I know, I know, Google is surveillance capitalism but I wanted to provide a fallback for people who CryptPad doesn't work for).

Image credit: Nick Youngson via Alpha Stock Images and Blue Diamond Gallery, Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0