Social networks cleanup
Being sort of frustrated with parts of the status quo, I’m in the midsts of wiping some of my accounts registered with “alternative” social networks such as Diaspora, Friendica or GNU Social. Not that they generally suck, but in some ways I have altogether lost time and motivation to really deal with these.
Yes they are community-driven, and maybe I would be better off not ranting but helping making them better. But then again: Why? I’ve been convincing people to move to Diaspora for quite a while. And I can merrily report to have converted exactly 0 out of nnn contacts I tried this with. So far, nobody cared. No, the open social networks aren’t ghost towns – in fact, they are pretty much populated, way more than Google+ in its early days. But in the end, I guess, with the state they reached by now, most if not all of these approaches will remain tools for a small minority of users because they get one basic thing wrong: Sure it’s interesting to think about distributed and decentralized social networks running on top of Software Libre, ready and available for you for the taking and running on your own server. Yet: That’s not really what I want. I don’t want to be forced to go through all this again, to set up a host of my own, to maintain PHP and database software of my own, to deal with all the pains and nuissances arising from this. Given that amount of time remaining for dealing with those things, I’m more than busy keeping this WordPress instance more or less maintained. I don’t want or need new social networks just for the sake of adding more contacts to the list – I want to have an all-in solution that “simply” allows for communicating with a wide range of people all over, no matter which network they are on, without requiring me to join all the networks and have a bunch of accounts, apps, whatever running out there, each one just to stay in touch with