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I feel the same. I find social networks pretty valuable but don't like or trust Facebook. I'd happily sign up (and pay for) a social network that brought the same benefits but was (1.) ad-free and (2.) didn't employ tons of people trying to maximize my engagement.

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Then check out https://joinmastodon.org/ you can either host it yourself or join someone else's server where you can either pay/donate or just use it for free.

So mastondon is an open source twitter clone right? is there anything out there yet or in the works that is more in line with Facebook's product offerings with out the surveillance and tracking?

Kind of, Mastodon is the 'Twitter' part of the fediverse, PeerTube is the 'YouTube' part, Pixelfed is the 'Instagram' part, there are even people who try to use ActivityPub for things you do on GitHub normally. And you can follow and interact between all of them (theoretically and to some degree actually too).

But what you're looking for sounds mostly like Diaspora, which is quite old, it's from back in the Google+ days, and never really took off.

I started to get an instance of diaspora going, but it was too icky and so I had to give up.

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