 I'm going to talk very briefly about a permanent solution to the social media issue many within the past week have emailed me often very nervous about the situation with social media in that companies like Facebook, Google, Reddit, Twitter, these kind of companies do not just dominate us as individuals but they have become much more powerful than even government itself. And we have absolutely no recourse whatsoever because it's not just we cannot do anything legal about them but we don't even have recourse to them in any way whatsoever. There's nothing that we can do. So I want to explain the real solution to social media. I've said this before but I just want it to be very clear because the technology is out there for the solution. But I don't think the awareness is. Okay. Long story short, the solution is federation. Okay. Let me explain what that means. You have to understand why companies like Facebook and Twitter got big. Okay. People use Facebook because other people use Facebook. Facebook and all of these sites have networking effects. When more and more people use them, let's say people are in the case of Facebook, an alternative to Facebook eventually emerged to Google Plus, which everyone knows no longer exists. And the reason it didn't exist is because it could not get that number. No one was going to switch and leave their Facebook even if Google Plus had advantages because Facebook is where everyone is. And no matter how good the alternatives are, you cannot just move everyone in one fell swoop. It's not going to happen. So Facebook and Twitter and all of these sites do very egregious things and people do not feel like they can move over because they would be abandoning all their friends who are still on the platform. So they have networking effects. So how can you have that on one hand? How can you have people looking at all of the available content in the world? But at the same time, how could we also have a system where one central authority doesn't control every single bit of information that goes through that? They don't have the right to filter everything, ban everyone and do everything else. Again, the solution is what's called federation, federated software, federated social media. I'll give you an example. There is a type of federated social media, a software project called Pluroma. Pluroma is out there. There are many instances of Pluroma, but it is not one site. Let me explain how it works. It is an alternative to Twitter. What you do, what anyone who knows how computers work or servers work, they can start up a little server and set up Pluroma just very quickly and easily. And that works like a Twitter site. So they can have them and their friends log on, have this Twitter-like profile where they can comment and do the equivalent of retweeting and stuff like that. It actually looks very nice. It functions very well. So Pluroma exists out there. Now, of course, no one is going to use your individual Pluroma instance, right? What's the point in that? But the nice thing about federated software is that there are hundreds and thousands, maybe, of Pluroma instances and all of them can interact with each other. So let's say you have an instance with just you and a couple friends that you start on your own server. Well, they can interact with anyone else who's on a server with Pluroma. In fact, it's as if everyone is on the same site. OK, so they can interact. You can start up your own instance where you have the terms of service, you do whatever you want. You can even ban people you want. But of course, they are not banned from the system itself. They could join another instance. They could start their own server. So everything is interconnected. You get the benefits of it having a centralized, I guess, environment where everyone can use the same kind of nice like and subscribe features and stuff like that. But at the same time, it's decentralized. So the control stays local, no matter what, even if, you know, Amazon wants to shut down your server because you unwisely picked Amazon to host your server on. You can easily just go to another VPS provider or start your own server. It ultimately cannot be censored, you know, over the long term. Now, even better than what makes this even better than contemporary social media, as we know it so far, is that Pluroma, like many other of these federated software types of things are built on what's called Activity Pub. Activity Pub is actually the back end to all this. It's the technical side of it. But what that means is I have an instance of what's called Peartube. Peartube is something just like that, but for YouTube. That is, I set up this software on my server where I can upload videos and people can comment, people can subscribe to my channel just like it is on YouTube. In fact, you can even do live streams now just like on YouTube. But because it's based on Activity Pub, like Pluroma, you can actually comment on my videos from a Pluroma instance, or you can share my videos from a Pluroma instance. It's like being able to comment on a YouTube video with your Twitter profile. So all of this stuff has the same kind of back end. There's Pluroma. There's Peartube, which is sort of a YouTube equivalent. There's also Mastodon, which is like Pluroma. It's sort of like a Twitter thing. There's Right Freely, which is I guess sort of like a blog kind of software. I don't know exactly what you would call that. There's also, what is it, Pixel something or other? I forget the name off the top of my head, but it is an equivalent of Instagram, kind of Snapchat-y kind of things. And there are many other things for Facebook equivalents and stuff like this. And a lot of this software is still being developed. But I just want to put it out there that it's there, that it's in constant development. Many more people are using it. There are many instances of Pluroma and Mastodon and Peartube if you want to get into it. Right now, I think the, again, I'm advertising the technology as it is right now. A lot of the people on these services are just, you know, I guess nerd hackers who want to play with the software. Or, you know, there are a couple like random websites who have their own instance and stuff like that. But the nice thing is it really is a long-term solution. And I'm not saying that everyone's going to get on an immediately, but you definitely need to know what this stuff is. Because this is something institutionally, which is superior and it's going to survive censorship. You know, I'm all for these other alternative video and social media sites if they exist. But this is much better because even if you don't know how to set up your own server, this is something that anyone can take advantage of who does. And you can take advantage of that. And it really does have all the benefits and all of the benefits of social media like Twitter and Facebook. And it also avoids the harm that we are going through right now. Okay. So that's it. Look into it. I'm going to put some links to some of these pieces of software and also instance links to, you know, the many different instances you can join. So just check it out. Check out the Fetaverse as they say. And I will see you guys next time.