'Ello, Ello.

[mikey]

[Please consider commenting via the forum even if you read this on Facebook or G+]

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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at http://ghost.radiofreetomorrow.org/2014/09/26/social-media-reality-check/

[blaisepascal]

Network effects are a great froce, especially if the main clarion-call of competing services are things which are low on people's radar, like privacy.

The way I see it, I have a few choices:

• Join all the services that my friends are on (LJ, DW, Twitter, G+, Facebook, Diaspora, Ello, etc), read all of them, and cross-post everything (to hit everyone who doesn't follow this strategy, and also get hit by tons of crossposts myself).
  • Pick a few that have the most people, but serve different purposes (LJ for long-form blogging, Twitter for tweets, Facebook for the networking), and deal with the Balkanisation that'll erupt (my LJ posts won't be seen by folks not on LJ, etc).
  • Decide that certain issues (privacy, control, etc) are more important than connectivity, and eschew the popular sites for more ideologically-pure sites (DW instead of LJ, Diaspora/Ello instead of FB, etc). In this case, I have few online friends, but I'm certain that I'm not getting screwed by LJ, FB, Google, etc.

Personally, I'm somewhere between the first and second options. I have accounts on LJ, DW, Twitter, FB, and G+, but I don't really use DW, Twitter, or FB. I'll probably get an Ello account, but again, I probably won't use it (but I'll claim my name in their namespace, and that's the important bit). If Ello gets enough people using it over FB or G+, maybe I'll consider using it more, but without people, why go to a social networking site?

[mikey]

That's about where I'm at, as well. Facebook's got the greatest gravity right now, and is therefore hard to escape. But being on FB is pretty much being in an abusive relationship.

Curiously, despite the fact that so many people I know dislike Facebook and are looking for alternatives, hardly any of them are using this forum

[blaisepascal]

That's the thing, this forum is just another thing to pay attention to (and I didn't get any notice of your reply, so I only found it when I came back to comment further anyway).

I am subscribed to 556 RSS feeds (many of them dead, but not unsubscribed), to LJ, to G+, to multiple Discourse fora (my makerspace, meta.discourse, RFT, Boing Boing, etc), and I'm sure I'm still missing things (Disqus, for one).

I have FB and Twitter accounts, but I don't use them -- with FB, I get emails telling me who's talking about me; with Twitter, I get emails telling me who's quoting 17th century French Philosophers. I think one of the last twitter posts I made was asking Wegmans Customer Service which Wegmans stores had in-store coffee roasters (Ithaca only).

I tried joining ello today, and I must say I'm amused. Their pro-privacy, anti-ad manifesto was tied to a request to share it on Facebook/Twitter/G+/Pinterest/LinkedIn/Tumblr/Reddit.

[mikey]

I'm not sure what broke e-mail notifications. That was working....

ETA Email notifications for different classes of thing can be turned on in your own preferences. I just checked, and the overall e-mail configuration should be working.

[mikey]

Apparently the answer is, release 1.0.1 broke notifications, and release 1.0.3 fixed them all at once, because I just got all the backlog after I updated...