Social media apps, especially thye ones run by Google, are notorious for abuse. They track you and are designed to keep you addicted. They can be and some are moderated by trolls.
About a year ago, I wrote a white paper, about what I concluded were the main vulnerabilities of social media, particulalry having to do with personal control, compartmentalization, and moderation in terms giving “full” moderation control to the creator of ‘any’ thread and further reinforcing this control by allowing the individual ‘user-content creator’ the ability to run an instance of the social-media software on his own pc, local or hosted, thereby eliminating the possibility of censorship, government or otherwise, from any external source. I also considered it vitally important that the thread creator have complete control over who gets to post to any particular thread. This way the content-creator can instantly ban anyone who disrupts the free flow of ideas, which you see so much in all social media, which makes it so frustrating to use. The content creator can even make participation available only on invitation, which limits this even further. Not only that; but these techniques also give the ‘individual’ user the ability to ‘absolutely’ protect the privacy and anonymity of participants. Just recently I found an app, that does most of these things called Mastodon. I really reccmmend taking a look at this, it’s quite marvelous.
I would like to think that my white paper, had an influence on this project; but in any case, this is just what the doctor ordered in terms of privacy, anonymity and controlling sensorship. I strongly recommend that Purism consider adding the ‘locally-hosted’ version of this app available in the repository.
Thanks