Mewe, pronounced Mais Ouais. 😉

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Mewe is like all other social networks were in their early days. In the early days it’s all about building a community, it’s all about privacy and it’s all about putting the user above commercial interests. Several years down the line they often shift towards trying to survive and even thrive if possible.

As I saw that Tim Berners Lee seems to support Mewe I decided to try the social network. It looks like every other social network and it seems to have a reasonable number of users. I skimmed through the groups and I noticed that “alternative” groups are more popular for now. I hope that this shifts towards being a community of people who prefer evidence based information. 

I am confused that a website about privacy encourages people to upload their contacts. This goes against the ethos of the site. Why would you need my contacts when you’re meant to be an organic community? Shouldn’t adoption result from sharing your profile rather than the other way around?

Why the shift? 

For me the web is a social place where people share projects and ideas. It is a place where quality conversations take place and where we establish new friendships. Facebook no longer covers that niche. It has over 2 billion users of which over one billion are monthly users. It has become too big to fail. 

Facebook does not assume the responsibilities that a network of its size and stature should assume. It controls what we see and in 2014 it played with our emotions. They never suffered the consequences of this.

A shift back to blogs

Mewe is an interesting idea but I would really like to see a shift back towards self hosted content and ideas sharing. I would like to see wordpress, wix and other projects gain traction. Diaspora and identi.ca tried to distribute online communities so that there was no single point of failure. They failed to reach critical mass. WordPress, both self hosted, and shared hosting could fill that niche. The more active we are and the more content we have the more traffic we get, and the more traffic we get the more sustainable our participation could be. 

Hiking, climbing, cycling

If you write about hiking, climbing or cycling I would be happy for you to write guest posts on this blog. I’d like to keep sharing adventures but cut out websites like Facebook. We deserve an organic, chronological sharing of adventures and pictures.