Social Jailbreak: a social media aggregator designed to circumvent social media monopolies
Social Jailbreak (SJB) describes a proposed viral application that would allow social media users to communicate beyond the limits imposed by social media monopolies. Several platforms (e.g. Hootsuite) and some social networks (mainly Friendica) merge their users' different newsfeeds that they have on other networks, to put them back in control and at the center of their entire online presence. Unfortunately, the most popular social network has disallowed the importation of personal newsfeeds.
One way to durably escape such social jails is to provide users a technical method to seamlessly share their soon-to-be jailed publications with others. While it is against the terms of social jails to export personal newsfeeds, personal contents can be published outside of the social jail before being fed to the social jail, and exchanged through the SJB parallel network, and if all the users appearing in each other's personal newsfeed have installed SJB (in a single click), they will all be able to consult and rearrange their newsfeed from outside any social jail. It will then be possible to merge all social contents (including forum messages, comments left anywhere, etc.).
Social Jailbreak would allow users to train their own algorithms, that would sort contents from those different sources in creative, emancipatory and non-mercantile ways (see MIT's Gobo), thus breaking the spell of social jails.
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