Comment by jwr
17 hours ago
Having moved to Mastodon, I also recovered some faith in the Internet (of old). You control your timeline. You are not the consumer being fed stuff, you choose what you want to see.
As a side note, I keep hearing people recommend threads, bluesky, or other corporate media machine du jour and I cannot understand how people can't learn a lesson. If you touch a hot stove once, you normally don't touch one again. And yet here I see people around me hoping (against all reason) that this time it will be different, really, this corporation is good, this service will not get progressively ensh*ttified like every other service that came before. It baffles me.
Mastodon is different. It is not owned by a single corp (nitpickers get your engines started) and can't be turned into a machine that juices your attention span for money.
Facebook’s best feature, at its peak, was that everyone was there. My friends and family aren’t on Mastodon, and likely never will be. If the goal of a social network is to connect with people I know in real life, rather than follow various Internet personalities, it fails at this for me.
This isn’t Mastodon’s fault, but it’s the reality of the situation.
I’m not on Facebook anymore due to what the site has become, but I found the same emptiness on Mastodon, as my friends aren’t there. I’m not influential enough to get everyone to move to a new platform just for me.
When I joined Mastodon, I ended up following a bunch of developers, but ultimately felt like a fly on the wall to a friend group I wasn’t part of, as a lot of these people had been real-life friends or co-workers. I guess if your friend group is all geeky enough to join Mastodon, it can work. I have very few real-life connections that fall into that bucket, which I think is the case for most people.
The people I know who still use social media seem more than happy with Meta’s products. The others just stopped using these things all together and don’t seem to care about finding an alternative.
I actually find people who are not already my friends to be way more interesting and to say something truly novel for me.
Yup, feeling the same way. Mastodon needs to leverage a friends graph somehow