Cooperative Social Media Were Liberating, Commercial Social Media Are Controlling

The original cooperative social media were liberating, social media operated as a conduit for advertising is controlling. At the very beginning of social media, APIs were open and there were multiple different clients providing different ways to experience the feeds. Problem is, as soon as you allow that, who is going to allow advertising in their feed? So user choice in clients was taken away.

Some of the old cooperative social media are still around. They work on donated resources or a free/pay system, but, similar to public television and radio, they do not have the reach of the advertising-controlled systems that run addiction algorithms. There are times when I suspect that the only way to run good social media is to run them as nonprofit cooperatives.