Aral Balkan is co-founder of Small Technology Foundation, which is promoting “everyday tools for everyday people designed to increase human welfare, not corporate profits.” Aral and his Small Technology co-founder Laura Kalbag have been advocating for regulation of surveillance capitalism, investment in ethical alternatives, and carrying out research and development on ethical alternatives.
Aral joins host Steve Boland to discuss decentralized social communication tools for nonprofit organizations (and everyone else!). Aral talks about federated communications tools (the Fediverse) like Mastodon (microblogging like Twitter but without corporate ownership), PixelFed (more image focused like Instagram) and many other ideas. Aral discusses the problematic relationship between charities seeking to have real engagement with audiences and how corporate platforms interfere at best, or undermine those efforts. Federate tools for communication and the small web in general puts more control in the hands of users and removes algorithms from the communications outreach loop for charities.
A program note: There was a microphone selection problem during this recording which has Steve sounding a bit muffled and far away. Aral sounds great, so please bear with the audio issue to get all the great information from Aral!
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