Having a few years of experience trying out alternative social medias, it came about time give others a recon of what’s out there and what are the strengths and weaknesses of each one.

MeWe

I can be found on MeWe here. MeWe is closer to a Facebook alternative as opposed to a microblogging platform like Twitter. In theory, MeWe would be ideal for organizing events especially as Facebook plays a heavy hand in cracking down on grassroots activism. It would be ideal for local political activism as well as national. However, as I understand it, MeWe prioritizes privacy, not free speech, a key distinction. The platform is smooth with posting links but creating pages and other cosmetic features require paying for them. Overall, this is the most polished of the ones I mention here.

SayScape

This is a good Twitter alternative founded by veterans. By aside from private channels for veterans and first responders to help them not be isolated, every other feature is available for general populations. It’s relatively stable, allows users to edit posts within five minutes. This platform gives every account equal accessibility throttling and boosting none of its users and it offers end to end encrypted messaging (like Signal.) On desktop it needs a reload before use, and I highly recommend dark mode. I can be found here. And my interview with its founder is here.

Gab

After two and a half years of fading Gab, I decided to give it a chance. This platform exists on its own servers and is very isolated in terms of major connections. Gab is somewhere between a Facebook and Twitter in terms of what it is designed for. While this will make them more resilient in the long run, right now the servers can be unreliable at times. Moreover, the site does not immediately respond to updates you’ve made. You have to refresh the page to see changes. So far I like the platform. I can be found here.

Others

Rumble appears as though it may be the DuckDuckGo of the video hosting space. But I find the different types of accounts and monetization methods, highly confusing, so I have yet to create an account. They do not yet have livestreaming. I’ll eventually figure this out and get on there, but until then I will promote the YouTube channel.

I have an inactive Clouthub account. They are not quite as free speech as advertised. They focus mainly on podcast hosting. To me, it is meh.

When I tried Minds a long time ago, link sharing was not smooth, making the platform unusable. I assume this has changed, but have not checked.