ayase

the only reason i havent yet is bc of the "waiting for approval" bit of finding the right server to be a part of. ive also heard of owners of said servers reading peoples dm's before, so im ancy about it.
i just like 2 sit on cohost really! unless theres a good spot on masto for me, but im confused easy.

I can't speak for anyone else, but choosing an instance alone feels like a bit of a nightmare? You've gotta trust whoever runs the instance, for one, not only to not snoop on you or suddenly kick you out, but to enforce their rules fairly and not shut the instance down without warning. It's still got some of the worst parts of centralisation, with the kicker that it's more opaque and has extra steps.

I had an account for all of about half an hour before the instance I was on got nuked, haven't really bothered with it since. Also personally feel that an "internet town square" is an awful idea; Twitter wasn't really even that good before Emerald Dunning-Kruger took over, I only stuck around cuz I was addicted.

For me it's two big things:

• The decentralized instances of Mastadon already makes me anxious because I don't want to have to pick one Mastadon instance and find out that friends I want to talk to are on another instance. I don't want that, I just want a one-stop shop for me and my current (and potentially new) friends to all be on. I've also heard stories of Mastadon server owners just deciding to up and close their servers, forcing/migrating others to another server. I'm not a fan of that either.

• The explicit Mastadon TOS against ABDLs/babyfurs/diaperfurs. That one's a big no for me because that's like, a core part of who I am as a person so if it wasn't just for the fact I didn't like the decentralized nature of Mastadon, this most assuredly keeps me out.

Cohost has been a great way for me to combine what I used Twitter for with what I loved about Tumblr and adding new features that, while exist on other platforms just seems to work better than other platforms (The tagging system is great, especially for Content Warning folks who want to blacklist certain tags to not have that content appear on their feed.) So, uncomfortable using Mastadon? Yes, this is accurate. But I feel nice and comfy here on Cohost.

Mastodon is pretty confusing to figure out and for a long long time it was VERY poorly explained. It's a little better now, but for ages it felt like a website only people with IT degrees could get the hang of and those connotations probably persist still. I only JUST signed up for it and find it extremely clunky and awkward to use so I'm not exactly jumping up and down to recommend it to people.

But at least it's not Facebook Mini™

It's just a worse discord server, with less privacy, since your DMS are readable by the server admin. Plus, getting invites is more annoying than good security/privacy(which it doesn't have, since the instances still interact with one another)