Chemistry and triangulosa » « Tell us, UK, how did you do it?

I bit the bullet and joined MeWe

It’s probably futile to resist the evil juggernaut that is Facebook, but I figured it can’t hurt to leap to this alternative, MeWe. It’s just like Facebook! Without the ads and the intrusive anti-privacy crap! Without that guy with the punchable face, Zuckerberg! Also without the teeming millions of users. It’s kind of lonely and quiet there.

But now all my friends will join! Right?

Chemistry and triangulosa » « Tell us, UK, how did you do it?

Comments

  1. says

    MeWe is walled garden even more tightly sealed than Facebook. On MeWe absolutely no posts can be seen by non-members (on Facebook non-members can see a tiny amount). I don’t participate in walled gardens on the Internet.

  2. drivenb4u says

    Why not? It makes sense that if you want in you’ll need to sign up. Otherwise you’ll have all manner of issues stemming from bots and scammers. Walls keep pests out of the garden.

  4. Jazzlet says

    MeWe allows pseudonomous membership. Personally I like having places where I can be private with a few friends. One of my brothers was well pissed off with Fb when it opened up the previously private group he was in for people with ulcerative colitis, as he said “It’s all very well family and friends knowing I have ulcerative colitis, they don’t need to know I shat my pants on the way home from the pub tonight, but the UC group understand”

  6. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Article: Rolling Stone – Inside MeWe (2019-05-23)

    MeWe was founded by entrepreneur and privacy advocate Mark Weinstein, a cheerful, loquacious man and a self-identified libertarian.
    […]
    MeWe is not known as a hotbed of extremist discourse in the same way that 8Chan or Discord are, nor does it have nearly as big of a user base. […] Keegan Hankes, senior research analyst at the SPLC’s intelligence project, is familiar with MeWe, and has seen far-right extremists […] gravitating to the platform. But Hankes isn’t as concerned about MeWe’s ability to serve as an echo chamber for Facebook expats as nearly as he is about Facebook and Twitter serving as a radicalization portal […] The goal, he says, is to “limit exposure” on larger platforms, and then “try to deal with those small communities,” so they can be monitored later.
    […]
    Weinstein has a simple explanation for this. “At this juncture, conservatives have been so vehemently censored on Facebook, the influx of them is simply higher right now than the influx of liberals,” he says.
    […]
    Weinstein takes pride in the fact that MeWe does not censor anyone, on any side of the political spectrum.
    […]
    But it’s not just MAGA supporters and centrists who are finding their way to the platform. Conspiracy theorists, such as anti-vaxxers and Flat Earthers, have also found a comfortable home at MeWe […] Weinstein freely admits that the platform does not feel a specific obligation toward preventing the dissemination of bogus theories. “There’s nowhere in our terms that says you may not post fake news,” he says. To prevent such content, he says, is tantamount to censorship: “it’s not my job to censor good, law-abiding citizens abiding by our terms of service discussing… their opinions.”
    […]
    the central issue with MeWe’s moderation policy appears to lie in its founder’s understanding of what, exactly, qualifies as hateful speech, and what does not. And hate speech runs rampant on MeWe, to the degree that racist, anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic memes can be found on virtually any right-wing politics group chat or page
    […]
    Weinstein is insistent in his belief that MeWe is for “the good guys,” a phrase he repeats multiple times throughout our conversation. “MeWe’s not about supporting hateful people,” he says. “[MeWe] is for the good guys.” But on the internet, as is the case in real life, being for the good guys usually means taking a stand against the bad ones.

  7. Friendly says

    To add my two cents to the Sky Captain’s comment, cutting and pasting from a Facebook comment that I made last week: “MeWe was founded by free-speech absolutist Mark Weinstein as a platform on which no speech, however hateful, would ever be restricted or banned. As such, it doesn’t constitute a safe space for any member of a vulnerable or marginalized community (or anyone else, for that matter) and is not a social medium in which I will participate.”

  10. wzrd1 says

    It’s for good reason that I refer to all such platforms for what they actually are at the end of the day.
    Antisocial media.
    The only reason I maintain a FB account is so that we can see our grandchildren.

  11. brain says

    From site’s FAQ seems that it’s a freemium business. I still have to see one that can actually sustain itself without the huge money income from personal data handling.

  12. F.O. says

    @paulhutch that’s not what walled gardens are.

    A closed platform, walled garden, or closed ecosystem[1][2] is a software system wherein the carrier or service provider has control over applications, content, and media, and restricts convenient access to non-approved applications or content.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_platform

    It is a matter of centralized control, not external access.
    This centralized control /can/ be good for users but it is really good for the owner.

    Preventing non-members from access can be good for the users, in that it protects the member’s privacy.

  13. Akira MacKenzie says

    When Google+ went down in flames, more than a few of the gaming discussion groups I was a part of migrated to MeWe. It’s a nice little community and I’d make to switch from FB if their weren’t a few groups I like to follow there.