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> since its really just the promise of social networks that people like. In practice it has not worked as a means of connecting people to each other. I went of
by gwd 4y ago
> since its really just the promise of social networks that people like. In practice it has not worked as a means of connecting people to each other.
I went off FB for a year or two, only to come back on when the pandemic started. I definitely missed the connections and conversations I had with family and friends across the world while I was gone. If I could have that without feeling like I was contributing to all the shenanigans, I would do it.
For work I created a Mastodon account, and so far it seems very nice. There are lots of cool people posting interesting stuff, and no ads. Unfortunately I'm not interested in the "public-only microblog" experience for my personal life, and fine-graned access control in a federated system is a tricky problem; and my experience with the systems that are attempting to address that issue haven't been very positive.
- mym1990 4y agoThe ad experience will come, because that's really the best option for a lot of platforms to monetize...and no one is running a charity. By that point a lot of users have been locked in and essentially just going with it.
- gwd 4y agoLoads of organizations have been running core infrastructure from donations for decades now. If you don't need to write new code, and don't have a pressure to actually turn a profit, and have people with enough investment in the community to donate time doing moderation / sysadmin tasks, then it should be easy to get enough donations to keep a server up and running. In any case, one of the core functionalities of most federated software is the ability to migrate your profile somewhere else.