Facebook is not commoning, and is not costless. It’s a way for a giant corporation to pump value out of your traffic and unselfconscious gossip, for profit, surveillance and Big Brother manipulation of your buying (or voting, or social ‘othering’) behaviour.
If you want to use software tools and platforms in the future, track ongoing developments in distributed P2P protocols, for example . .
- ActivityPub
- Dat and Beaker browser
- Solid
- Scuttlebutt
- Holochain: decentralised cooperation at scale; ‘the commons engine‘
and the ecosystems of apps that run on them: eg the Open App Ecosystem.
Such apps and protocols are the base of existing non-corporate (and typically free-to-use) social media platforms like . .
- Mastodon – Twitterish micro-blogging, many ‘instances’
- write.as – blogging. ‘Bringing blogging to the fediverse‘
- PixelFed – image sharing
- PeerTube – video sharing
- Loomio – distributed deliberating and coordinating (‘Better decisions together’)
There’s even a Mastodon platform – an ‘instance’ – that’s under cooperative ownership: social.coop
If you need cloud storage, instead of Dropbox or Google you can use NextCloud services, which run on open-source (P2P) software and offer free accounts of various sizes, for personal use. Click on ‘change provider’ to see more providers.
