I'm sorry, but I CANNOT agree. Coffee smells MUCH BETTER than weed. In fact, I think weed smells terrible. It reminds me of skunks. I would much rather smell coffee.

I've been on Mastodon for little more than a year. People here have been generally polite and give each other the benefit of the doubt. I have yet to see a "flame war" as we used to call it on USENET. But Mastodon (and Kbin and Lemmy) instances will have to decide if they will federate with Meta's new platform. I'm pretty vehemently opposed, but my Mastodon admin seems to think we should wait and see. So here we have Meta, which hasn't joined the fediverse, has already begun fragmenting us. Is that our fault? Maybe. But I don't think we're the problem.

I also like Tusky for Mastodon because you can also use it to open up your Pixelfed account.

I don't care for Karma-farming, but I liked having some way to tell if someone was a real community member or a throw-away account. I liked that there were some subreddits that wouldn't let you post if you had low karma because it helped hold back the trolls.

You can spread powder on the floor so you could see if someone had stepped in. It wouldn't keep them out unless they didn't want anyone to know they'd been in there.

Finding advertisers, billing advertisers, and collecting from advertisers is all work you can avoid of your users just give you money.

I've been chipping in for my mastodon server for over a year. The admin there posts the finances so we all know when it's time to kick in again, but if we went to a paid rather than donated set-up, then I'd be OK with that. If my admin decided that he needed to run ads that were like printed newspaper ads then I wouldn't mind so much. But ads that track me, ads that change size, ads that show up and block some or all of the screen, ads that play video and audio, pretend to be content etc are the ads I dislike and I would flee.

OK, true, but that's why they want to charge 3rd party apps.

Ehh, if Reddit is getting traffic from people going to see the trolling, then Reddit is still making money.

It doesn't have to be impeccable. It doesn't need corporations to buy ads. It just has to keep getting better and not die. Look at Linux. It never did overtake MacOS & Windows on desktops. But it keeps getting better and it didn't die and it took over server rooms. Look at Mastodon. It's nowhere near as popular as Twitter and maybe never will be, but it's 5 years old and is steadily growing. I like hanging out there. Oak trees start as acorns.