It’s a story of someone just wanting the “verified checkmark” on LinkedIn. Quite legit, right? Just that – afterwards – he started to check which companies his biometric data are now shared with.
17 companies with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Groqcloud on the list. And just as I wanted to mention “Usually — as a company — you have enterprise contracts that the data must not be used for training purposes”, the next surprise comes up. Because by using the system you consent to exactly that – well okay, not consent but “Legitimate interest”.
In the end I agree: the checkmark might not be worth the invest.
Nolto.social started as a small experiment as a free alternative to LinkedIn. The author wanted to explore ActivityPub and see what could be built. There was no funding, no team, no roadmap. Just an idea and some time.
Within a few weeks, almost a thousand people signed up. Companies created pages. Articles were posted. Events were shared. I never marketed it. It spread through blogs and word of mout
According to the author, Nolto was never meant to be a polished product. It was one person building something interesting to see what would happen. Now, the author has decided to shut it down.
Some might dismiss it as another AI project failing. – I see it differently.
What Nolto Really Proved
Nolto demonstrated demand. A private project attracted users and companies in record time. It showed that people want this. That companies want this. The author open-sourced the code and had the courage to stop it when it became clear the project was beyond their capacity to maintain.
What I see here is an opportunity!
Or as JTensetti writes it:
Nolto proved something simple:
You don’t need permission to experiment.You do not need funding to create value.
And you don’t need to be “approved” to build.
To everyone who builds, even when it’s uncomfortable — keep going.
It was one person building something interesting to see what would happen.
At this point I have decided to shut it down.
Ahh too bad.
But I respect the decision of this guy! He made quite a thing but also admits that he’s just a one man show and doesn’t have the experience to operate such a thing. I might have done the same in his situation.
Since I am moving more and more away from BigTech (see here…), I was wondering if we need a Fediverse alternative for LinkedIn. I don’t even want to go into the details but LinkedIn shows the same bad symptoms as all other big “social” media plattforms.
Xing, Fediverse, …?
Yes, in Germany we have Xing, but Xing is mainly in Germany and they stripped a lot of community features that made it a bit unattractive.
Another Fediverse-account? Yes, would be an alternative. But LinkedIn just specialized on career-features. Like showing your past stations in your career and your profession in the profile. That’s just super useful.
Nolto The Professional Network That Respects Your Freedom
Then, just recently I read about “nolto.social“. Which aims at … well .. exactly that! Being an alternative to LinkedIn.
The Nolto startpage is pretty clear: Own your data. No algorithms, no ads, no lock-in. Okay, shut up and take my money. Oh, It’s free!
Import data from LinkedIn
I just signed up yesterday and exported all my LinkedIn data (which … isn’t a lot, since I deleted almost all content). Now my profile is filled! The career details, education and skills are all maintained. Great!
To me, LinkedIn was supposed to be the professional network — a place for thoughtful discussion about work related stuff and genuine connection. Yet, over the years, it feels that the content and tone has shifted for engagement (“what do you think?”, “how do you do it?”), self glorification (“especially after quitting a company and highlighting all the successes” srsly, if it was so cool, why did they quit?) and provocative extremes. Everything for the reach.
I’ve written a couple of times in the past about my goal to leave #LinkedIn. The last time was a month ago, when I wrote, ‘I found my replacement for LinkedIn!‘. Since then, I’ve only logged in to add new contacts, to check if it’s someone’s birthday, or to read messages.
But I kept returning – only to feel the same mix of disappointment and annoyance every time. Eventually, I asked myself: Why did I keep coming back – even though it never felt useful?
As I’ve written earlier, I’m going more and more away from LinkedIn (like here and here). During my #unplugTrumpactivity, I decided that I want to go a step further and remove all my content (posts, answers, likes) from LinkedIn. On Mastodon, I have auto-delete activated already for various reasons. Now I wanted to clean up LinkedIn, too!
If you’ve been following my blog, you know that I’m gradually moving away from “classical” Big Tech social media, focusing more on Mastodon and my own homepage.
On Mastodon, I came across Elena Rossini and followed her journey toward greater digital sovereignty. Inspired by her example, I decided to give up my YouTube channel in favor of a self-hosted PeerTube instance.
I just figure: it is exactly 2 months since I wrote Good Bye posting on LinkedIn?. And it seems I’m ready for the next step: Good bye reading LinkedIn?
My inital idea was to change from LinkIn posting to posting on another, work/IT related Mastodon-account – just for the sake of getting off a commercial platform. But then I started asking myself the “whys” …
