Exploring decentralized chat and microblogging platforms
Free Connection
© Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash
Diaspora, Friendica, and Mastodon are free and decentralized microblogging platforms that keep you in control of your data.
Social media platforms are well established as an important means of communication for corporate environments as well as for personal users. Most users are aware, however, that data sovereignty is a significant problem in the social media space: Almost all leading platforms collect and aggregate user data for advertising purposes. In addition, government organizations sometimes make use of this information. In the USA, for example, providers are legally obligated to hand over data about their customers to investigative authorities such as the FBI after receiving a National Security Letter. Many users also worry about their data becoming exposed due to an attack, and centralized services pose a higher risk for attack, as the data is concentrated on a relatively small number of servers.
The problems associated with the massive, proprietary social media platforms have caused some companies and home users to pay more attention to short message services based on open source projects. These open source solutions are free of data mining, and their decentralized nature makes them less susceptible to the security problems associated with the Internet giants. This article examines some leading open source alternatives in the social media space.
All three of the tools described in this article support ActivityPub, a free protocol for supporting cross-platform social networks [1]. If two social media platforms support the ActivityPub protocol, they can exchange messages.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.