There has been a lot of controversy recently over social media websites like Twitter swinging their ban hammer on personalities with opinions they don’t like. As a libertarian, I believe in property rights and so Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and the like should certainly be free to ban people for whatever reason they want. I also believe in the free market’s potential reactions to bad decisions by business owners, which include boycott and competition.

Thankfully, the competition has arrived! Mastodon is a decentralized social media replacement for Twitter and it does an excellent job. I recently joined the “Liberdon” server intended for libertarians and voluntarists. Not only is Mastodon decentralized, in that anyone who wants to can run a server, but it’s also “federated”. Federated means your server can be connected to all the other Mastodon servers, that is so long as the other servers want to be connected to you. Each server sets its own rules for which other servers they’ll federate with. So if the NAZIs or Communists start a server, no one has to link up to them – the market decides instead of a centralized corporation like Twitter. However, even if no other servers federate with, say Chris Cantwell‘s server (I don’t think he has one – just as an example), he can still run his server and hate-filled bigots and racists can join it and talk to each other. Of course, each server can be controlled and its policy set by its administrator, so intra-server censorship is still possible (most servers prohibit spam, for instance), but given you are free to start your own server and set your own policy, you can’t be censored if you start your own platform.

I do not know who is running it, but a Mastodon server called Liberdon recently popped up, so I decided to join it. I also deactivated my facebook account this week after basically quitting using it in January. Here’s my personal account on Liberdon, should you wish to follow my posts. Plus, I created an account for Free Keene, one for Free Talk Live, and one for LRN.FM – the Liberty Radio Network.

If you are a liberty-minded person, protect yourself from censorship and join Liberdon and the “fediverse” today! If If you aren’t liberty-minded, but want to get a Mastodon account, you can start by picking a server and signing up wherever you feel most welcome. Visit Mastodon.social for their offical site.