Intellectual Property Is Bullshit — Upcycle This Website
like most of us, i'm pruning back my presence on the web so that i can better manage how and where my data flows and lives. with every corporation opting to sell us out, charging us to sell our data, or harvesting it to train some artificial intelligence model that practically no one has interest in and is all but certain to be wildly destructive to the planet, the need to pare back our presence and be more intentional and deliberate when it comes to how we engage.
Kolektiva is an instance of the open-source platform called Mastodon that looks, feels, and works much the same Twitter did, except, unlike Twitter and Bluesky, you have access to the greater "federated universe" (a.k.a. The Fediverse) of platforms. what does that mean? imagine you could like a friend's Instagram post from your Reddit account one minute then forward a meme to your partner's Twitter account… that's how the Fediverse works. this one is for people who generally adhere to far-left, antifascist, anti-capitalist, anarchist, and adjacent principles.
when you mention Mastodon, people groan and tell you it's confusing or that nobody is on there or that they're tired of joining new platforms, yet when Threads launched, people didn't hesitate to sign up for yet another corporate-controlled platform. the same process played out before Bluesky launched where they were eager to get an invite and join. three and a half years after joining Kolektiva and even bouncing around between other instances and learning how best to leverage the Fediverse, it hit me that, to me at least, social media was dead and any shot the Fediverse had at displacing the mainstream platforms had long passed. i committed to deleting my account in Spring 2025.
exposur.es is project with the aim of creating a safe haven for artists—queer and trans people, sex workers, sex educators, and anyone else who has been the victim of censorship—to collaborate with each other and freely share their work in whatever form it takes. in its previous incarnation, it existed as an instance of PixelFed, or what some where calling an ethical dupe of Instagram. on exposur.es, artists are liberated from exploitation and censorship. at the moment, the project is taking new forms and might reappear less as a social media replacement and more as physical spaces to create, share, and learn together.
after my hosting provider deleted the entire instance without warning, i was pretty wrecked. i had put innumerable hours into maintaining the server and hundreds of dollars in fees. after the dust settled, though, it hit me that maybe it was an opportunity to liberate the project from the confines of the modern web and the played-out social media experience. i'll have more to share about what happened and where i envision the project going soon that you can find here.
the plain, uncomplicated, battle-tested Signal. there's not much to say about it. use it. get together with friends & partners to help each other switch away from WhatsApp, iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or whatever other platform that is currently selling you out. and if you're on Android, use Molly (a more secure version of Signal).
The link above should even open the app for you if you already have it installed and set up!
another decentralized messaging platform with solid security and privacy. signing up is more or less also anonymous, metadata leakage doesn't pose much risk, encryption is on par with Signal, and it works for one on one messages as well as group chats. you can even send voice memos (something anyone who messages me is no doubt familiar with heh).
it's as smooth an experience as any other messaging app for the most part and the anonymity factor makes it one of the few messaging apps / communication platforms i'd recommend to organizers & activists—whether you're organizing something entirely above board (a.k.a. "legal") or connecting with someone who is in need of healthcare treatment which has recently been outlawed where they live.
email me and i'll send you my chat invite code.
my entire website is mirror on the I2P's hidden services and reachable at byfrankmorrow.i2p.
"wait, i2p? is that like dot com or dot rodeo?" to be honest, for years, i might've asked the same question. lol I2P is similar to Tor in that you can't access websites without specific software which makes it ideal for creating anonymous websites and circumventing state & corporate censorship.
i plan to lean on it more heavily as more and more of the clearnet is made unusable by artificial intelligence or creepy surveillance.
bump into me around Brooklyn! i'm regularly cruising on my bike, strolling with my camera, or sipping coffee in a park, so let's get together!
you might also find me working on the local citywide mesh network or at a distro with some mutual aid outfits around town. maybe we'll end up shoulder to shoulder working on one of these community efforts together.
i'll admit that i'm not as active as i was in the so-called Before Times (oh how i miss dancing until the sun came up), but you might catch me lurking the streets in search of live Jazz, a burlesque show, one of those bike parties of dozens or hundreds of people riding around the city together, the occasional art installation or coffee cupping, or, perhaps, at various sex-positive, body-positive, nudist-adjacent locales & events around the city (though maybe that'll become mere wishful thinking with the way things are headed with purity culture).
my interest in some of the latter spaces, in particular, is waning though. what i once experienced as an underground, word-of-mouth scene built on trust and mutual respect has, like everything else, been captured by capitalism—monetary and social—and thus morphed into a clout-chasing social media content fodder factory of primarily boring cishet people clinging to aesthetics of edginess or cis gay men—both of whom are tacitly queerphobic and ableist. they can keep their shitty, exclusive-as-in-othering SERF'n'TERF Fire Island parties, i'll take a mellow nude beach with real community or a weekend on a lake upstate with partners & friends every time i'm given the choice. here's hoping that we see more COVID-conscious clubs that don't require you to buy an NFT to go to a play party (if you know, you know) sprout up soon.