Journalist Jason Koebler reaffirms my thought that an instance of Fediverse is not difficult to sign up and use. Though he talks about Mastodon here, it is applicable for Fediverse.
So, Mastodon:
Not difficult to sign up for
Not difficult to use
Has an app like every other social media network
Not owned by world’s richest man
Not owned by a company whose main platform has been credibly accused of facilitating genocide by the United Nations
Not funded by the guy who made the last place, which sold itself to the world’s richest man
Doesn’t have a crypto thing going on
Free and open source
Administered by a crowdfunded nonprofit
Decentralized, portable, and interoperable
I have been contacting Indian media outlets and journalists via email and private conversations for the past few weeks, asking them to publish their work on Fediverse. They most likely know everything there is to know about Fediverse and Mastodon. Since I value their work and thought that having them in Fediverse would have been advantageous for them in the mid term, I made the requests. My requests were met with silence and nominal response. They prefer Facebook, Instagram, X and Threads since they believe that they can connect with their audience better than those few in Fediverse.
Now, after reading Jason Koebler's article, I have a better understanding of this context.> Anyways, I am using Threads, and I will continue to use Threads, because I am a pragmatic person who wants to connect with readers wherever they are because my livelihood and my reporting relies on it. If Threads "wins," I will submit and use it daily, probably for the rest of my career. Right now, I feel like my brain is falling out of my skull at all times because in order to spread the articles we publish on this upstart website, I need to think about the slightly different ways in which I will share it on Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, Instagram, LinkedIn, BlueSky, TikTok, etc. All things considered, I’d like to pick one and stay there, but that will result in fewer people reading our work and not meeting our readers wherever they are, which isn’t a smart move at this juncture. So, I’ll keep using Threads, but I will not become an evangelist for one of the biggest companies in the world because it is slightly less bad than the alternative, when an actually moral alternative with none of that baggage exists.