Internet based Social Media has by far been one of the greatest innovations in communication in the 21st century. Several platforms servicing different areas have emerged, such as Myspace, Facebook, Twitter and tumblr.

The most popular services are offered free for use, but they’re funded by selling your personal data.

The criteria of what can be sold and who it can be sold to is murky and contentious at best, with companies making users sign their rights to their data away with Terms of Service Agreements that are pages long and heavily use legal jargon that the everyday person isn’t likely to understand.

That’s where this blog comes in.

Alternative Social Media will offer users a choice of social media platforms, ones that respect a user’s rights and control over their uploaded content.

Every week there will be posts relating to a single service and will include:

What does it do compared to other platforms?

What are your rights over your data?

How does it work?

What are the limitations?

How to install?

How to setup and use?

How to share information?

In return, users will be offered a chance to voice their suggestions and complaints relating to these platforms on our blog (https://altsocmedia.wordpress.com/), where they will be passed onto the project’s developers to improve these services after this experiment is complete.

We do know that this blog employs the very mechanisms that its trying to avoid, notably Facebook and Twitter.

This is unfortunately due to limitations imposed by the analytic tools required for this project. After the completion of this project, the tools will be removed from this blog.