I'll unlurk for a moment ... To quote Yogi Berra "No one goes there nowadays, it's too crowded."
In addition to the business model concerns, we have a fundamental conflict. If there are too many people, the noise level is overwhelming, if too few, then why bother? The other problem is too many places to check so I don't bother. Tough for small communities (such as family members) I do use messaging apps. It means accepting notifications from WhatsApp, Signal, WeChat etc., but I can control those. At least email floats by in my stream and I've developed my own tools to help with that -- something platforms like Facebook and Musker see as existential threats. I see Mastodon as a noble effort but with its own issues. Hmm .. musing ... maybe a tool to manage our own message pool of email messages rather than managing each one individually. I know that there have been efforts to pull conversations together. There was Lotus Notes. But I wonder about building something more like Facebook or other platforms but running locally (or on our own server) with email as the exchange. That can help address some of the cost issues - at least for those not trying to monetize millions of acolytes who living in my shadow. For now, I've got tools that allow me to quickly drop in on Facebook and occasionally LinkedIn though I feel LI has a sales vibe. At least FB I have a small community. I manage to avoid most of the ads on FB and their simple threading and groups sort of work. Attempts to make smarter as in G+ fail. G+ in particular because it wanted me to curate my relationships and took it all far far too seriously. Bob Frankston https://Frankston.com -- Silklist mailing list [email protected] https://mailman.panix.com/listinfo.cgi/silklist
