Facebook-free February
Talk has been building for a while about Facebook’s questionable practices and how life could be better without Facebook. However, if you bring up the idea of creating a Facebook competitor you’ll undoubtedly get the answer “people won’t create another account,” even though “your parents” have made their way to Whatsapp, Instagram and even TikTok.
We hope to accomplish the following goals with this campaign:
- Help users see that social media doesn’t need to be controlled by Facebook and to think about what they really want from a social network
- Make a statistically significant dent in Facebook usage sending the message that users WILL walk if advertisers always come first
- Support and promote alternatives to the major social networks
Mastodon and Signal
We chose Mastodon and Signal because they work in very similar ways to popular social networks, they’re open source, and they’re popular with people who make the internet for a living. People should be able to figure out how to use them easily without having to be particularly savvy, and they don’t have to worry about their data being compromised by the makers of the platforms.
Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good
There are lots of budding social media platforms out there, and you may already have a favourite alternative that we haven’t listed. That’s awesome and we hope that site catches on. However, for a short term experiment like this, it’s really important that people can try out a new platform with their friends. This means ultimately picking something and getting to the part where people are trying it out.