What with X turning into a cesspool, and now Meta's properties apparently evolving into playgrounds for MAGA, many people have been turning to BlueSky as their preferred social media platform.

I like BlueSky, and have an account, but I really don't post there for the same reason I was never a big fan of Twitter. It has limitations when compared to Facebook.

For TikTok users, there's also a great alternative. A new social media platform called Fanbase was launched in summer 2024. It's almost a clone of TikTok, but is U.S. -owned, meaning it's free of the national security concerns associated with TikTok and its parent company, ByteDance. They even have a migration tool that will transfer everything in your TikTok account to a Fanbase account.

However, for those of us who prefer the way Facebook functions, minus the ads and data aggregation, there's another alternative which sort of rose up a few years ago, but then disappeared from public awareness. It's called MeWe, and is much more like Facebook than X.

(This originally ran in the New York Times and is republished under Fair Use)

Nov. 24, 2024

By Daniel Chandler
Mr. Chandler is an economist at the London School of Economics.

The election victory by Donald Trump and his Republican Party was a rebuke of a Democratic Party that has positioned itself as protector of a despised status quo, rendering it unable to connect with an electorate desperate for change. Defeating Mr. Trump in the future will require liberals, progressives and others on the left to articulate a positive vision that can capture the imagination of a broad majority of Americans.

But where can they find the inspiration for such a vision?

The answer lies in the work of the towering 20th century political philosopher John Rawls.