For me the main issue with Instaham and Failbook, as you name them, is that they are proprietary, centralised, corporation owned, and that the main method of financing it is selling private people's data to data brokers.
I think we permies, if we are interested in using ethical tools and methods, we also should be using ethical platforms. For me this has to comply with the "3 Res": Respectful, Responsible and Resilient.
Respectful in the sense that it will not do any potential harm to the user and it will respect is privacy, rights and freedoms.
Responsible in the sense that it will not potentially lead us into a distopian future
Resilient in the sense that it depends not on one centralised institution that in the future may change its terms of service or end it altogether, but that it could survive any of these changes.
The permies forum as long as I know, is respectful and responsible, but it misses on the resilient, because it is centralised on one person/institution that dictates how it works and could change/end/sell in the future the whole user base. (I'm not meaning that they will, hopefully not,and I assume that is not their intention at all)
There is a very interesting initiative called the fediverse.https://fediverse.party/ which intends to tackle this issues. It is libre software, federated, and replicates the functionalities of all major networks, like failbook, instaham, twiter, etc., but into a connected network of networks. Why isn't everybody using those then? Because of facebook and popular social media platforms lobbies and marketing, they instaurated theirs as the default. Now, there is the "network effect",
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_effect, which in a few words means that the networks that have the biggest number of users are more interesting, and a new network, be it ethical, secure, private, beautiful, whatever; if it has no users/friends to network with, it doesn't offer us any value.
So how do we get everybody into a federated, free/libre, private, secure, freedom and right respecting platform? I don't know, but I hope we will.
PS. there are a bunch of new social networks which promise to end the fails of the popular ones. Please, before using them, triple check if they are really ethical. According to my own investigation, the Fediverse is our best bet for the future.
