The sad truth is the other site will be fine, it'll just chug on without all of us -- or with us, in a reduced capacity. There will be times where it'll hit new highs of active users, even.

There has always been a market for disinformation and hate. If the other site suffers the same fate the equivalent news outlet does, it'll be the dominant social media platform in short order.

At the risk of being saccharine, I'm glad we're here and we have this. I hope you all stay.

#law #lawfedi

I can't help but notice many toots from helpful newbies encouraging you to support the Mastodon Patreon.

It's fine to do that but understand it goes to just two big instances and the official Mastodon dev team.

It does NOT trickle down to YOUR instance. If you want to support your server, donate to it directly. Nearly all the costs of the explosive growth of the past few weeks is borne by local instances.

Mastodon is decentralized. There is no Mastodon Inc. This is not Twitter.

I joined this site a fortnight ago today.

I did not have a clue how it worked, or about its lore and culture.

Now, it seems intuitive - though not because I am adept but because networks and protocols are familiar and practical things.

We use them all the time: www, mobiles, emails, etc.

And this place is structured to encourage calm civility.

It was Twitter which was strange and, in many ways, inhumane - rewarding clicks and rage and vileness.

We just got used to it.

And now we are out.