I think consuming and producing information should ideally go together. Usually, I first talk about something I read with friends. Through these dialogues, where together you talk about what you have read, you gain new insights.
Some years ago I started taking private notes and shortly writing thoughts about events and articles I had read, which can be accompanied by sharing more elaborate thoughts on social networks. If I made a short note for something I read, I already started to read more carefully, because I knew I would have to write about it. It might have also made me more critical about the value of certain sources of information.
I'm now in the process of writing my first blogs publicly, on specific topics that interest me, but where I also know that at least certain friends / groups of people are interested in reading it. For me these are the first steps to make sure that I spend time on sharing thoughts and ideas that have value for others.
I just followed the course on Distributed Systems by Maarten van Steen at the University of Twente. It was brilliant, and he has written a book on Distributed Systems. It is freely available via https://www.distributed-systems.net/index.php/books/ds3/
Sigh. These kind of things, as well as the Signal outage, are not helping efforts to help people switch to better messaging alternatives. It nicely illustrates the centralisation of power though.
Thanks for sharing your considerations. It's good that people care and think carefully about which services to use and not to use, and also share it.
I think the main problem is that the idea and implications of decentralisation are hard to fully grasp. It does not imply privacy or security. It does imply decentralisation of power, decentralisation of rules & code of conduct and decentralisation of financing.
My own experience:
Mastodon has provided me a first step in more digital sovereignty. It is very refreshing to have a timeline that you can fully control.
Moving to Mastodon felt like moving into a new village. You start with an empty timeline, and you have to actively work on your first connections.
After some initial effort, you are rewarded with meeting interesting people. They welcome you in their communities, and you can keep on discovering amazing people through the messages they boost!
The question was: "What companies are you excited about?"
I won't argue these organisatoins are perfect. Is that your criterion? I'm excited because I feel they are going in the right direction. That's why I'm using their services. I use Brave, but don't have the time to dive into things they are doing well or doing wrong. That's what we have investigative journalism for. I'm very happy to pay for that. By the way, I also use Signal. I also have a Fairphone. etc etc.
The next step after excitement is of course to convert excitement into action, and to actually support these organisations, through buying their stuff or making donations. Not because they are doing everything well, but because I personally believe they are helping to improve society.
Why: Because these organisations seem to take a moral responsibility on (some of the) things I value, like 'people-first', digital sovereignty, privacy, mitigating the climate crisis.
Also because a non-profit like ROS donates all their profit to NLnet, which in turn supports amazing projects:
https://nlnet.nl/project/current.html
Just a quick list but could keep on going for some time :)
I think consuming and producing information should ideally go together. Usually, I first talk about something I read with friends. Through these dialogues, where together you talk about what you have read, you gain new insights.
Some years ago I started taking private notes and shortly writing thoughts about events and articles I had read, which can be accompanied by sharing more elaborate thoughts on social networks. If I made a short note for something I read, I already started to read more carefully, because I knew I would have to write about it. It might have also made me more critical about the value of certain sources of information.
I'm now in the process of writing my first blogs publicly, on specific topics that interest me, but where I also know that at least certain friends / groups of people are interested in reading it. For me these are the first steps to make sure that I spend time on sharing thoughts and ideas that have value for others.