I’ve been on many, many social media sites even some you may have never heard of, even moderated globally for at least one of them, some I moderated groups on.
I never enjoyed them because they were commercial and the only thing that matters to commercial sites is money and growth, not good moderation, not creating sustainability etc.
All of them eventually enshittified or were shit from the beginning.
Mastodon, after a brief period of not understanding it, is the only one I have ever felt comfortable on and the only one that despite people nay-saying it has continued to tick along from strength to strength whilst all others I have seen get worse because they have, and always will be about money and squeezing the life out of it by requiring as many people as possible, anything else effectively doesn’t matter because money is what drives them.
So no, it is not a ‘cope’ or whatever ridiculous concept comes next, I’ve personally seen the effects of what happens time and time again and it’s never good.
As for the telephone, well, personally, I’ve never been a fan, a worldwide global network where anyone can reach you whenever they want by knowing a number and more and more sites insisting you hand it over. The irritating grating noises they make, the distractability of modern ones because they have to get you hooked and dependent on them so they can make money off of all that personal data. The fact that there is 0 end-to-end encryption built into the networks themselves and likely never will be, that it can cost so much because those that run it are greedy, taking not just your money but also your time, count me out.
Technology is controlled by and for those that run it and so far, mastodon is the only network I have seen that actually cares about things like sustainability, good community and really considering the tech and trying to influence it to be better in ways that are for the user not corporations. All the rest? Well, they’re all shit because their goal is only making money to pay back their investors or because those that run them only care about having as much money and power as possible, or both.
I’ve been on many, many social media sites even some you may have never heard of, even moderated globally for at least one of them, some I moderated groups on.
I never enjoyed them because they were commercial and the only thing that matters to commercial sites is money and growth, not good moderation, not creating sustainability etc.
All of them eventually enshittified or were shit from the beginning.
Mastodon, after a brief period of not understanding it, is the only one I have ever felt comfortable on and the only one that despite people nay-saying it has continued to tick along from strength to strength whilst all others I have seen get worse because they have, and always will be about money and squeezing the life out of it by requiring as many people as possible, anything else effectively doesn’t matter because money is what drives them.
So no, it is not a ‘cope’ or whatever ridiculous concept comes next, I’ve personally seen the effects of what happens time and time again and it’s never good.
As for the telephone, well, personally, I’ve never been a fan, a worldwide global network where anyone can reach you whenever they want by knowing a number and more and more sites insisting you hand it over. The irritating grating noises they make, the distractability of modern ones because they have to get you hooked and dependent on them so they can make money off of all that personal data. The fact that there is 0 end-to-end encryption built into the networks themselves and likely never will be, that it can cost so much because those that run it are greedy, taking not just your money but also your time, count me out.
Technology is controlled by and for those that run it and so far, mastodon is the only network I have seen that actually cares about things like sustainability, good community and really considering the tech and trying to influence it to be better in ways that are for the user not corporations. All the rest? Well, they’re all shit because their goal is only making money to pay back their investors or because those that run them only care about having as much money and power as possible, or both.