Originally published at: https://ethical.net/guide/facebook-alternatives-guide-how-and-why-to-avoid-facebook/
Facebook’s professed mission (which can be found on its investor relations page) is to “give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” But a slew of recent revelations about the company – among them its role in influencing elections, traumatising its content moderators and even its involvement in ethnic cleansing…
1 Like
I have created a social network / encrypted messaging / video calling site called Coms, at https://coms.global. Coms does not collect, share or sell user data in any way, and does not allow 3rd-party cookies or foreign code, so no advertising or plugins that can compromise user privacy. Coms was launched in May 2020 and is presently seeking users. It’ll remain free throughout 2020, then it’ll probably nag for a small optional annual contribution to keep it going.
The problem here is that if you put ethics in general, and especially privacy, aside for a minute FaceBook is really good at what it does.
I’ve been meaning to go through all of the alternatives listed above and try them all out but just haven’t found the time for it yet.
Of the two that I have just taken a look at now though, one just isn’t so easily accessible (people love the fact that they can access FB on any device, anywhere, anytime), and the other was just not visually nicely designed or intuitive to use (which people who are really anti-FB will put up with but the masses won’t).
Ethically FB is pretty poor but it’s going to be a very hard sell to get the majority of people to move to something that they perceive as being worse at what they want it to do.
I’d really like to take a look at Okuna but it seems that you can’t sign up without an invite code… if anybody feels like inviting me, it would be very appreciated.
Hi,
is the abovementioned up to date, Oct 2020?
Love to have your getback,
Amir!
I’ve spent a lot of time trying out most of the above and a whole load of other ‘alternative’ social networks.
My favourite by far, and the only one I’ve stuck with and am active, is Cake - https://cake.co
Thanks for your list of facebook alternatives. There’s many things FB is bad at and you’re correct on the privacy issue. Then there’s free speech. If you post something they don’t agree with they will either delete it, put you in timeout, or ban you all together.
Please consider adding Blurp to your list. Blurp has many of the same features as Facebook. Blurp Online - The True Free Speech Platform guarantees users their free speech with no censorship. Blurp is also a veteran-owned site as per their about page.
I have no experience with Blurp and am going to take a look!
But I have checked out several social networks and forums that make a big point about being free of censorship and sadly they very often very quickly become hotbeds of intolerance, extremism, conspiracy theories and quite often dangerous misinformation.
I don’t know what the answer to that is, I’m not sure there is one.
You can use selfcial.com. It was created 2 months ago and it doesn’t use political correctness and no data spying is used. Check it out and help it grow!!!
Well, you can try selfcial.com. It was created 2 months ago and it is using no data spying system and no political correctness. It is fully free and it looks like fb. Check it out!
I just took a quick look at selfcial and didn’t get a great first impression to be honest…
The domain name takes you to a blank page and you have to add /home after to get any content.
More importantly, I can not see any kind of about information anywhere, no privacy policy, terms of use, why it is ethical or anything else. I don’t think that it’s a great idea to sign up to anything without access to that information.
Thank you for the detailed review of FB.
Hoping more people decide to leave FB soon as this platform has become beyond powerful. I’m in the process of following your steps (and others) to permanently delete my account.
I will be looking to ethical.net to help me find alternatives.
Thanks again.
I’m always curious about what exactly it is that different people want from a social network.
Putting the ethical standpoint aside for a moment…
It seems to me that everyone loved Facebook and what it offered them until it became ‘too big’ and just bombarded you with stuff you don’t want or need all of the time, but most alternative social networks are ‘too small’ and don’t have enough community engaging to keep them interesting.
So, is there some optimal size for a social network to be, how does it reach that critical mass point to get up there, and once it is there how do you stop it from continuing to grow and becoming too big and busy?
I think we’re getting closer to the point where many don’t even need a social network. No matter what size. I see people deleting most of their accounts and just keeping one so they’re still on social media. I imagine is the one that gives them less headache. Others are on but only visit their accounts once a month or so… There are other ways to quit social media 
Look at Signal. Millions are quitting WhatsApp and moving there. So it is possible to mass migrate from one network to another.
I don’t know enough to talk about optimal size but maybe more regulation would help. Some are so big they buy the competition. How healthy can it be to concentrate so much power in one company?
I just hope people realize real change takes place offline
Do you know about digital gardens?
Maybe, but I think that for every person who is growing tired of and realising the huge amount of privacy related and societal issues connected with mainstream social networks and deleting accounts, there is a new person signing up to take their place. Facebook isn’t shrinking in user numbers, it’s just not growing at the rate it was previously.
I have had bad experiences Facebook. They tend to ban people for anything. As a business man, I simply used Facebook to promote my businesses. I think that’s what the majority of people use Social Media for. Well, with that being said, I was constantly banned several times. So I decided to create a Facebook Alternative that helps people get their content out to the word. No Limitations or Email Verification. Join today https://www.thaspott.com
You are a very smart man!
I’m curious what the reasons given for banning you were, FB seem to be pretty liberal in their policies to me, and they always give some kind of reason.