2022-11-07 from the editor of ~insom
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I'm doing okay. A couple of good weeks at work has cheered
me a lot, although it makes me keenly aware how much work
effects my mood. That is a bad thing, to be clear.
New people are discovering Fedi because of (waves hands) The
Current Events. I find a lot of people's comments about
Mastodon/Fediverse bely a real bias towards the "winner
takes all" mentality that VC-driven software scene has
promoted. In no place is this more clear than in the
HackerNews comments section.
I try not to get annoyed because HN is kind of _the place_
for people who think that way. One thing that _is_ annoying
is people saying how what we're doing on Fedi "won't work"
despite the fact that we're about 5 years into this
experiment and it's doing okay, thanks. Doesn't mean it will
work forever, but neither will Twitter. Sure works for now
though.
I have been involved in groups on the Internet deciding to
move from one place to another (because the old one sucks)
since ... I have been in groups on the Internet. Moving from
irc.iol.ie to irc.indigo.ie, then the irc.phishy.net. From
Twitter to App.net, from Twitter to Mastodon, from Tumblr to
Ello, from Facebook to Google+.
Some of these things don't exist anymore but I've found that
attempts to wholesale move away from _anything_ and then
wait for its sudden implosion aren't grounded in the real
world. Even when failure does come, it's slow and steady and
sad and rarely sudden and cathartic.
Tumblr is still going, even after losing enormous amounts of
people over its adult content ban. Ello still exists.
Mastodon doesn't need to win; people can go back to Twitter
if they miss something that it has. Hopefully some of those
people stay on both services. Maybe some of them move. Maybe
it's not for some people: that's okay.
(Heck, I still have a Flickr Pro account, even though the
world moved to Instagram and 500px, although there is the
vibe of an abandoned mall to the place.)
