The Internet has tenants and landlords, which one are you?

Many complain that they are censored on the Internet, that they can't speak openly about certain topics for fear of losing reach and revenue, and so on. They depend on platforms over which they have no control, they are like tenants that can be kicked out at any time. When you post on platforms like X, Instagram, TikTok and YouTube, you are using someone else's platform (someone else's home). The moment you stop being profitable and the advertisers or the owners of the company don't like you, they censor you, they kick you out.... And you can't do anything about it. Or can you?

The cheapest way to protect yourself against the whims of one platform is to use more than one. If one platform fails you, you still have the others. In my opinion, it's best is to use a free platform that is part of a decentralized network. If you are not convinced by any platform, you can set up your own. Is this expensive? No. Thanks to the ActivityPub protocol, it is very cheap to create a node within the Fediverse. The Fediverse is a large decentralized network with which you can reach millions of users. You can choose PeerTube to upload videos, Mastodon to create and share short written posts, Lemmy to discuss with other people...

You can also buy a domain name for very little money and set up a website on a server that you rent or set up at home. For further protection against censorship you can also set up a hidden Tor service.

You can also create a mailing list or a group in a messaging program. With this method, your publications reach your recipients directly, without depending on arbitrary algorithms that can limit your reach. If the server from which you send the emails belongs to you, you will have more control, you will be the sovereign.

In short, the trick to avoid censorship and the whims of big owners is to have your own platform or channel. If this is not possible, the best thing to do is to have several accounts spread across different platforms. This way, if you are censored on one, you still have the others.

Reddit loses users and money for ignoring the complaints of its own users

Reddit is paying the price for ignoring the users' protest against latest changes made by the company.

On the one hand, many people have moved to platforms such as Lemmy, which has tripled its user count in a short time:

On the other hand, the Reddit site was taken offline by protests in which more than 7000 Keep reading Reddit loses users and money for ignoring the complaints of its own users

Stop using Reddit

Thousands of Reddit communities will stop being accessible tomorrow in protest against the decision to charge millions of dollars to apps that use the API. As a result of the policy, many apps will stop working.

However, while some people are recommending that people stop using Reddit, the protest is limited to two days. The problem with doing a temporary boycott is that it sends this message to the owners: a lot of people are angry, but after two days they're going to come back and we're going to keep making money. Reddit stopped being free software years ago and it's not going to stop censoring information they don't like.

I support boycotting Reddit, but I think it shouldn't just last two days; it should be permanent. There are several programs similar to Reddit that are free and respect the privacy of their users: Lemmy, /kbin, Postmill, Lobsters, Tildes...

Lemmy and /kbin, unlike Reddit, are free and federated, so the administrators of a node cannot censor information from nodes they don't control or impose anything on them; each node has its own policy.