@blogdiva
Yes!

For me, the Fedi is real and aspirational at the same time. It is important not just because of what it is (and falls short in many ways) but because of what you and I and many others believe it could be and should be and must continue to move towards.

@blogdiva @_elena I whole heartily agree. And I’m an Old here. I originally joined the Fediverse in 2917 on an Instance that wasn’t very active so I rarely interacted and posted.

But just prior to the first wave of massive Twitter migration I checked back in to find out I had 24 hours left to move to a new instance. Boy oh boy, my new home was actually not a place I wanted to hang out locally. So I quickly learned to build my Home stream by following interesting people and interacting with them by comments, shares (boosts) and then I saw interesting people there who also,like me, had commented. My Home stream became my first read of the day when I checked in.

Now, where did I find those people? Why that would be the open source Wild West of the Fediverse. The numbers of people posting made a fast moving stream and I could pop over to any interesting post and there were my People! My Tribe is on open source social media and I found them! What a joy.

After a few months I refined my streams to appear in column view, 3 columns across: Home, Local, Fediverse. After a year I found out about Lists and by golly, I could put a List as another stream in a column! My “rock people” are in one, my personal friends in another, my “news people” another. Wowie, I’m making my own algorithm for me, me alone, and it works well. I no longer miss current posts from people I care most about. Yes Antifa Lisa, I’m here for the #Anarchy and #PunkAsFunk. Go Fediverse! Go Mastodon! Go beige.party which is my Instance and #NotACult

@blogdiva Ha, presumably you've already seen this perfect encapsulation of the fediverse as being punk as fuck?

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/115812058723304135

RE: https://rustedneuron.com/@jackwilliambell/116358781100014322

@blogdiva

I've been here since 2018 and I'm a year and two months from 70; I have grandkids old enough I'm concerned I will soon adding 'great' to my family title.

Of course, the difference between me and the other grandparents still using the facesite? I'm a coder and software designer and at times in my career got to see how the privacy invasive sausage was made.

My somewhat sweary take on the recent 'what is the Fedi about' discussions here:

@blogdiva
Pretty much the same for me: I don't want to have my social interactions mediated by an algorithm that is only thinking about optimizing profit.

Mastodon is a break from the ceaseless bargaining and hyper optimizations of pretty much everything else I could interact with. 99% argument free; the lack of reach is a feature, not a bug.

cc @_elena

Je ne parlez pas Francais. Tres desole.

@blogdiva I'm in my early 30s, for whatever that's worth, and I mainly use the Fediverse for posting cute art I make, or at least that's what I use Friendica, Mastodon, and Pixelfed for primarily.

The Fediverse is sorely missing a DeviantArt equivalent, though, as I've effectively abandoned my 16-year-old DA account at this point; I'm keeping it around for posterity, but I'm no longer actively posting there and haven't really been active there for years now.

I recently updated by bio on there to acknowledge this and point to the places where I actively post now, those being Blacksky, Pixelfed, Mastodon, and Friendica.

@blogdiva

As a 30 y.o. Brazilian, I'd add that there's breadth of nationalities as well, even though most Fediverse instances are often biased to a defaultist, US-centric worldview.

And such an existence of biases leads me to a point of your post:

@blogdiva I'm here for bird photos, Linux, and people who know what "ttrpg" means.

Arise, ye nerds!

And I am over 65.