Roadsigns towards a #deplatformed life

2021-05-05
3 min read

A #deplatformed life

The five roadsigns to follow becoming #deplatformed are:

  1. Vote for political actors wanting to regulate, breakdown, limit and tax the big tech.
  2. Move communication services to smaller providers and more personal channels, like email.
  3. Get your content directly from the sources, via newsletters, newsreaders, websites, etc.
  4. Minimize the amount and meaningfulness of tracking data about yourself (including reactions and interactions).
  5. Stop producing free content for big platforms. If you need to publish there, just post a link to content you control.

Deplatforming is not difficult. There is plenty of alternatives for any service provided by the “GAFAM” big tech companies: after all, mostly are trivial services (chat, email, calendar, status updates, office suites, etc).

In some cases, it was not trivial to start some of these services when they started, or to scale up to meet surging demand. But, usually, big companies do not really bother with innovation: they just buy something that shows some promises (innovation != investment), then they buy the market for themselves.

What is difficult to overcome is exactly this network effect. Everybody is on whatsapp, nobody would notice if I disappear. Even if few will notice and maybe migrate to an alternative, they will never uninstall whatsapp. This kills competition, both in product innovation, privacy protection, customer care.

This network effect was spectacularly demonstrated at the beginning of 2021, where social media censorship became blatant and visible to everybody. At the same time, Whatsapp announced a privacy change which was considered harmful by many observers. Many installed Signal or Telegram, as a whatsapp alternative. But, after few months, whatsapp is still there, with the same network share. Yes, Signal/Telegram subscriptions spiked. But there wasn’t any actual migration.

Part of the problem is due to the false alternative represented by these two messaging apps. Telegram is completely opaque: for what is publicly known, it might be even worse than Facebook (who owns whatsapp). Signal services are hosted on Amazon AWS and Google Cloud. The shutdown of Parler, the right-wing Twitter alternative surging before the USA election, made clear that there is no escape. Either you submit to GAFAM control, or you are deemed to die (or never become relevant).

In order to achieve the greater good of restoring competition amongst tech firms (shouln’t politics regulate this?), I would incur in an immediate network cost, for inevitably restricting my contacts. That’s why vote is (always) the only real escape to both monopoly and monopsony.

Unfortunately, we are dealing with global companies the populations and economy largely depends on: they can simply shutdown their services in a region, to make regulators do what they want.

The five roadsigns point to compromises to move our activity outside of the platforms, without incurring in too much personal cost. Few exmples:

  • Receive a whatsapp message, reply with an email or sms
  • Install a newsreader and get content direcly from publishers you are interested in
  • Open an email on a minor provider. You can do so for less than 1€/month, including your own domain
  • Open a blog on any minor blogging or hosting service to publish your content
  • Comment social posts by email, to the author
  • Move discussions out of “groups” back to mailing lists, forums, etc

I think these few examples are also very good practices for digital focus.

I’ll be back on these topics in the next #deplatformed post.