Discussion
What a load of crap.
Yeah, a bunch of ‘my people’ are still there on X-Twitter too.
But you know what? I’m *here* on Mastodon. If I’m one of ‘their people’ (as a few used to tell me), they also could find me here. *They* could come to a place that is not owned by an asshole (BTW, calling Musk an asshole is the euphemism of the century).
But they don’t. They don’t want to start from scratch on another platform, rebuild a network (or, let’s be honest, an audience).
Communities work both ways.
@grishka I’m fine with missing out. Maybe it’s an age-related attitude, I don’t know.
My best IRL friends all use WhatsApp to stay in touch. When I told them that I don’t have WhatsApp and didn’t plan to install it, they understood. They grilled me for a while, but in a playful way. Then they accepted my choice and while they keep using WhatsApp among them, they keep me in the loop in other ways. We also make videochats happen more frequently. And everyone’s happy.
@grishka Clearly I can’t expect this level of compromise and ‘working together’ from other internet acquaintances, so I’m fine with whatever decision people make when I leave a service. But it’s nice when exceptions happen. I’ve seen some of ‘my people’ on Twitter at least make the effort of opening a Mastodon account to keep in touch. There are also a couple of people who have quit social media entirely — so we keep in touch via email.
It’s not much, but at least it shows a minimum of care. 🙂
@morrick for me, the situation is that a few friends are on the fediverse, a few still on Twitter, a few more have Telegram channels (I use Telegram for all my messaging anyway, so it's natural), and a lot more are on Instagram. One friend uses Bluesky and I follow him through that bridge bot. Another friend crossposts into VK and his Telegram channel but is contemplating writing his own fediverse server software.
@grishka Social network fragmentation is a bitch. Social networks shouldn’t be ‘owned’ by anyone. It would be fantastic if everything could be properly federated, with idiot-proof account creation, where people can build communities and communicate in a good, real way, instead of fighting and enjoying watching the world burn.
It’s a dream. But it keeps me going and willing to make my corner of Mastodon a bit like that, with these values.
@morrick idk, maybe I'll change my attitude on this when I finally have a boyfriend. But for now, I can't fathom intentionally making myself more lonely, it almost feels like self-harm to me.
@morrick even VKontakte, with all its misguided mismanagement, is still not quite dead. But it's sure close to that. Imagine fucking up a social network so badly that people switch to a Meta product.
Install Fedizen
Get the full app experience
@morrick but then you end up missing out a lot. As much as I hate Meta, most of my social media activity right now is on Instagram, despite it being blocked in Russia since 2022, so I'm sort of forced to use it. I do use a modded app at least.
If you leave a service, people you care about would just keep posting there, whether you're there or not. That's the core issue at hand. That's why some obviously unfixably bad social media services refuse to die for decades.