There, I’ve said it. It’s true.
I hate Facebook with the passion of a thousand burning suns. I could go on for hours about all of the bad and the terrible. In fact, I have. It’s pretty easy to get me going, in fact.
I fought joining Twitter, until signing up meant that I was more likely to get that job that I was after. Once I did, I was pretty well addicted. I fully embraced it as a microblogging platform, until Gamergate showed how lax they were with enforcing any sort of abuse policy whatsoever. I stayed as long as I could stand it, but eventually a vote was taken, and the citizens of Skippy chose Twexit.
Google Plus was just disappointing from beginning to end. Not only did Google/Alphabet/whatever decide to get rid of my favorite Google products (I STILL WANT READER BACK! YOU HEAR ME?), not only did it force gender-normative real names upon YouTube comments, not only did it replace Picasaweb (IT WAS FINE YOU JERKS), but it ended up being lackluster and bland.
I tried ello. Flash in the pan, and pretentious to boot.
Livejournal was my home from 2001, and I slowly migrated away from it, until its new-ish Russian parent company decided that all users were subject to Russian law.
I missed Vine entirely. I blinked, and it went away. And, yes, I’m going to point out how similar its life was to the length of its videos.
Snapchat? EEeeeeuuuuggghhhh….
Diaspora? Now THAT ONE had my attention. I signed up for notifications, and I wanted to host my own pod, and it was awesome and was going to be the best and… I have no idea what happened. I don’t remember ever getting the notification that it was available for use, or I did and never signed up or… ? No idea.
Mastodon seems to be a modern Diaspora, and the only problem I’m having so far is figuring out which node I want to be associated with for the life of the platform and/or until that particular node goes down for good. I’m unsure about how that data can be migrated if that happens, but whatever. I’m going to give it a try.
I’m not looking for a replacement for this blog, or for my vlog, or for my gaming videos. Actually, I take that back, I’d love to find a replacement for YouTube. But, I’m not expecting Mastadon to be that. I’m expecting it to be a place to connect with friends and view microblogging content and that sort of thing. On a distributed, open source platform.
If you’re interested, check it out. :) I’ll be posting my contact info there soon!