On Social Media

Many thanks to Edward Morbius and all the contributors to this group, for helping so many of us make informed decisions about where to go next. I've decided to head to the federated services worlds, starting with Mastodon and Pluspora. I don't want a single corporate owner to own the ability to arbitrarily switch off my whole community again. I choose this one value ahead of other factors, like the current size of the community, the 'polish' of the UI, the integrations with my mobile devices ... Others will make different decisions, and they won't all be wrong :-) We all enjoyed G+, so take that sense of enjoyment and improve whatever service you end up using!

I've been enjoying Mastodon for a few days, starting by joining an instance targeted to a community that I already associate with, and then poaching people from the federated timeline. After a couple of days, the feed seems ... useful and busy enough. It isn't a G+ though, it's a Twitter. There are some thoughtful conversations, but there are lots of throw-away tiny posts that don't necessarily add to your life, just like Twitter :-) There may be some use of #tags, but I don't see much like Communities. Pleroma and GNU Social seem to be in the same format, with small UI differences (yes there are probably significant structural diffs, but ...). I'm looking for the form of G+, not necessarily the number of users. Does anyone here have more suggestions for me? :-)