We’ve been receiving a lot of emails of readers who appreciate this content and who ask us where on social media we may be active, so that they may join and contribute ideas, opinions, comment on articles, etc.
We think that would be a great idea. As of this writing, there are about one thousand unique visitors on each of our new posts (rough count with grep on a logfile, as we don’t use trackers or analytics tools). Among that thousand, we are sure there are lots we could learn from, or who could share very interesting insight with the rest of this nascent coronacircus “community”.
The reason we aren’t on traditional social media is we don’t wish to lend our labor and creativity to behemoths, immoral corporations who censor individuals when they’re not tracking or trying to manipulate them.
However we have now found two excellent and alternative platforms we have joined and would like to encourage our readers to meet us on.
The first is Twetch, the second is Hive. We will briefly explain why we believe them to be good solutions. And in any case, irrespective of any of this, we will keep happily answering emails as we have been, and we will keep updating this coronacircus.com website as regularly as we have up until now.
Behemoths such as Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Youtube, etc. are private initiatives, so the people who run them are free to enforce whatever iniquitous rule they’d like. That doesn’t mean we need to like it. And indeed, we will certainly not work to help their growth by lending them our labor.
Alternatives exist however, and they represent the future of social media. These moral alternatives are intrinsically decentralized and, as such, are based on a blockchain.
Blockchain is just a fancy word to designate a distributed ledger (or distributed database). The content isn’t centralized and monopolized by a select few. The incentive mechanism isn’t typically based on artificial Internet points (e.g. reddit karma), but on cryptographic coins that are exchanged on the same blockchain as the one the content is posted on.
There are two main advantages: first, these systems are censorship-resistant. Content that is posted on a blockchain is immutable. The only way to remove it would be to hard fork the entire chain (and still it wouldn’t be removed per se, a copy would still exist on the former, pre-fork chain; plus people would be free not to adhere to the fork). Second, it is much more resistant to manipulation, astroturfing, bots, spam, etc. as each action on the chain generally involves a very small cost (which is negligible on the individual level, but prohibitory at scale).
Remember what we wrote in our post about non-compliance: we don’t need to convince anyone, and we don’t need to change the world. The only control we have is over ourselves; we shall only endeavor to act in conscience. Other people are responsible for what they do, we are responsible for what we do.
Therefore, even if these alternative social networks are smaller, they are the only moral way to go. It may be more practical to post to Reddit or Facebook (to get more views, interactions, etc.), but the priority is doing what is right. We try to act correctly, and we trust the Universe will do whatever it must; it’s out of our hands. If it doesn’t, so be it, it wasn’t meant to be.
To come back to these 2 social platforms: Twetch is a Twitter alternative. It is an amazing platform based on the Bitcoin SV blockchain. Mark our words it will be big some day. It is still in beta but you can apply to join and will most likely be accepted. People who are joining now still have a 5-digit handle, which will be a rarity in a few years.
Hive is equally amazing: it is a Steemit hard fork. Long story short, Steemit Inc. was taken over early this year by a Chinese big government shill, a short fight with the community ensued, which culminated in the community forking the chain and creating Hive. Everyone that matters migrated, and in a few days the Hive coin was worth more that the original Steemit coin. Here is the longer story if you’re interested. It is a beautiful illustration of the power of decentralization and open source; something for the history books.
Our handle on Twetch is @11641, our name @Icaros. On Hive, we’ve created a community called conspiracy, and our handle there is @icaros.
Many people think technology is a tool of surveillance and oppression; although it is true that is one aspect, we believe it is more emancipating than it is enslaving. In the future we will be trying to make that demonstration, by expanding on the philosophy of crypto-anarchism.