There’s no company. There’s a W3C-approved standard (two of them, actually - OStatus and ActivityPub), a guy who spent a year or two writing a user-friendly client for them, a Github project with a growing number of contributors, a bunch of other people hosting servers, and an assortment of Patreon campaigns to pay for continued development and to help pay the bills for the servers that aren’t being run out of someone's deep pocket. And enough people deciding that they are fed up with Twitter for there to be enough of a community to make it worthwhile.

Corporate-owned social media that tries to pay its development and hosting costs by putting as many ads in front of your eyeballs is unhealthy. The fact that this is pretty much all we've had for the past decade or two makes it easy to assume this means all social media is unhealthy.

One can argue that replacing real-life relationships with digital ones is unhealthy.

And digital lives are more easily monitored by governments -- not just the American or European governments, which is already bad enough. This too is dangerous.

Being able to go into a community of like-minded people translates in the meat-world to meat communities where your neighbors might have a completely different perception of reality than each other. This too is problematic.

I understand now that there is no company behind it. It's open-source and developed with good intentions, but as the saying goes, the graveyard is full of good intentions. I deeply distrust anything that entices me to reveal personal data in a medium monitored by the secret police.

How much these objections weigh for you depends on your priorities. Non-corporate, open-sourced social-media isn't significantly different for me to assuage my very real Internet privacy terrors.

You have a problem discovering people in real life if you have niche interests -- I was talking to a gay grad student and he explained how isolating it is outside major cities. Relying on organic social dynamics to do their job will get you nowhere. The chief concern for projects like this is can they gain enough traction to be useful. Also it's unhealthy to have expectations of absolute privacy, in private communication you rely that the contents are not leaked from one party -- with data driven platforms you give a little piece of information in return for a service. Hell, half the businesses on here can only work because it's possible to market to niche groups and for niche interests. This is peacetime if you ignore what is effectively a low intensity conflict for the West happening in the Middle East. If the country you are living in was mobilized for war you would have zero expectations for anything, individual concerns of autonomy are irrelevant at that point and with very good reason -- no gains made for individual privacy would remain in that situation anyways. The 'secret police' doesn't care since they are concerned with the willing and unwilling agents of other countries 'secret police' -- there are plenty of targets to fry before they ever bother with you, aiding and abetting their primary concerns is a quick way to move yourself up the list.

> One can argue that replacing real-life relationships with digital ones is unhealthy.

One can argue lots of things, but I think it's a crucial support network for people not near lots of like-minded others. What "real life" peer group is a trans kid in small town in Kansas supposed to hang out with and get support from?

That is a fair point.

I worry for what transpeople -- who lack meat-world social choices -- are enticed to reveal about themselves online to the secret police. Our governments' thugs are happy to lend an unsympathetic ear to their problems.

That's a fair point, too. And non-governmentally, there's nothing preventing Joe Neonazi from creating an LGBTQ-friendly-seeming instance to collect people to harass.

One mitigating factor, though, is that there seems to be a wider disconnect between Mastodon IDs and real life IDs than there is between real life and Twitter. I have plenty of Mastodon friends who could be sitting at the next desk as I type this for all I know. Also, having multiple Mastodon accounts is seen as a perfectly normal and acceptable thing to do, so @joe@joefamily.name might post vastly different stuff than on their @jane@transfriendly.social.

>> Yet another social-media company.

There's no company.

Yet another social-media whatchamaycallit.

Somehow I end up not following my own advice and simplifying and making only one point per comment. That way people wouldn't focus on a minor thing about it and ignore the rest of it.

(The advice being: I think a good part of the reason why some one-line comments end up getting so many upvotes is because they say only one thing. The more things you try to say then the more reasons there will be for people to disagree and downvote you so no one else reads your message.)

Your comment ranged from unhinged rant to moderate and reasonable depending on which edit you were on. I decided to focus on the part that was both consistent and worth addressing.

Thank you for addressing the reasonable and consistent part of my unhinged rant.

I know what the real problem is. No rapport was established. You are in the defensive because you feel I corrected you as well and thus passed judgement. It's human relationships.

Your post had so many straw men that I advise <no_smoking> tags around your post. It’s not that there was so much to disagree with, but rather I couldn’t suss your point beyond “the hive mind is hypocritical”, which...doesn’t leave me much to argue with.

What's your point?