@atomicpoet Elon-free

@atomicpoet Good question. My guess is that people are just fed up with Facebook and the 🐦site, so they try out ‘whatever’. And subsequently feel clueless.

@atomicpoet knowing that your posts are being / can be muted unless you pay to access the audience you've built up.

Also, decided it was time when an Andrew Tate post was placed into my feed even tho I'm a non-macho, liberal, peace loving 54 year old married father of two....

Plus I didn't like the feeling of knowing I was being done over...

And decentralization too of course...

@atomicpoet it isn’t owned by a psychopath

@atomicpoet
Elonless twitter.

@atomicpoet

For me it's the people

The quality of posts and interaction is very high, informative and rewarding and it contains very little 'noise'

And while the level of interaction may be lot lower than on the birdsite, it's more than made up for by the quality

I'm also looking forward to trying out some other Fediverse services and check out how seamlessly they integrate

@atomicpoet "It's Twitter with less of the suck"

@atomicpoet lots of cool nerds here. Seriously, i got on here because of Brian Lunduke and since, ive found that Lunduke isnt really all that, but man there's a ton of cool people here! Its like Twitter for nerds. It also reminds me of what i liked about MySpace and Facebook before they got huge and algorithmic. Real people having real conversation. But most of that would have been hard to convey before I got on because of a recommendation from Lunduke.

@atomicpoet
The culture.

I never used Facebook and read Twitter or Reddit stuff mostly when following a link from elsewhere.

But my impression of e.g. Twitter was that people mostly replied to something to start an argument or get personal (YMMV, obviously).

If Twitter is an ongoing bar fight, then Fedi is the reading room of a library, full of pipe-smoking elder professors, and when you post something, one of them might give you an appreciative nod.

@atomicpoet Mastodon appealed to me because it's #freesoftware. Before I joined Mastodon, that was the only requirement, but then I realized how the federation works, and it's freaking awesome!

@atomicpoet No algorthms and ads for me. I was just tired of being bullied by algos and lectured on how to create content in a way that will allow to be seen. When I joined I didn't even understand what decentralization was.

@atomicpoet If by decentralization you mean controlling the content I see, not having to deal with omnipresent corporate ads, minimizing being a cog in big data (as much as is possible on the internet), having control over my account, having the ability to control my content (as much as is possible on the internet), and simply enjoying my own social media empowerment...well then...I'm here for the decentralization, too. If that isn't what you meant? I got nuthin.

✊ ❤️✊

@atomicpoet for me it was just a way to join a social network that functionally is like Twitter, but doesn’t come with any guilt or stigma now that Musk owns it.

@atomicpoet for me is the #opensource aspect of it combined with decentralisation, data ownership and data persistence.

There is no point in opensource code, when it is running in somebody else's infrastructure which we cannot audit (ie. Signal).

Anyway, those are the reasons that made me come to the Fediverse... but the most important question is about the reasons that make us stay... and those are all about the people and the quality of the engagement here. 😊

@atomicpoet initially it was the no Elon thing, but it quickly became more about the people and community that I found.

@atomicpoet Twitter was melting down, and more acquaintances had transitioned here, plus the FediFinder tool let me keep enough contacts to not feel lost; not true ot Cohost.

@atomicpoet It feels like I'm talking to real people who want to talk about stuff, share their genuine interests rather than try to go viral

@atomicpoet Back at the beginning of the year, nobody new if Twitter would even last a few days. With Elon not paying his bills the whole thing could come crashing down. Alot of the smol floofs had no place to go. I'd signed up on the big instance but then they closed registrations. I figured it would be tough for these people to make the leap so I set up my own instance and guided many of them here.

@atomicpoet no algorithm means it's one of the few social platforms that don't try so hard to make you want to pull your hair out

@atomicpoet I loved Twitter — well, Tweetbot. A chronological feed of short-form text and images from a list of people I follow and nothing more is exactly what I want out of a social network.

Once you-know-who shut down third party apps I found the official client incomprehensible. Thank goodness @tapbots made @ivory.

@atomicpoet

I'd spotted the various apps on f-droid & been failing to get round to finding out what that was all about when Musk first threatened to buy Twitter, so I procrastinated only a bit more & then went for it. So it was kind of avoiding Musk but also I really can't stand ads, like if adblockers didn't exist I couldn't use the Web, so I love it here, *and* I love sticking it to the corpos, of which decentralisation is a big part.

@atomicpoet For me it's not decentralization (of the protocol), it's the how it enables more diversity in my activity. A few years ago, it'd be fair to say that apart from maintaining a professional homepage and one for my project, almost all my online activity was on Twitter. Now it's split (by my count) about five different ways, and Mastodon is just one of those five.

But it enables me to parcel things out, post them different places, etc.

@atomicpoet

I suspect many that came over as part of the #EternalNovember #TwitterMigration came over to the #Fediverse & #Mastodon because they saw other people join.

I.e., momentum.

@atomicpoet less toxic. i still have no clue how to navigate this, so i guess this is a major reset for me.

@atomicpoet it’s about connecting with decent people without being force fed ads and having what I see manipulated by an algorithm and also the freedom to avoid instances that are a bit polemic. Decentralization is not a panacea We have to have rules & fund it and I favour subscriptions. The sheer “value” of “free” large centralized platforms attracts certain (best avoided) wealthy egotists and as they forget about the people who nourish them they will shrivel up and disappear.

@atomicpoet
Better quality of engagement, really interesting people, easier to connect.