Thank you! I'm really glad that you feel like this place is home, and thank you so much for your support.
The less said about Xwitter the better, heh. On a personal level I'm really digging Bluesky -- I like what they're trying to achieve and a lot about the team really reminds me of the early days of LJ, both in the sense of "trying wild technical and social experiments, seeing what sticks" and "oh god we're a team of 20 people and we can't keep up with demand because the internet has arrived en masse", heh. (The entire team has also been extremely gracious about listening to me backseat drive them!) The speed of it is definitely not for everyone, though, and there's still the open question of how they're going to be able to reach sustainability; they went with the VC funding route, and even though I genuinely believe the team is sincere in their intent to create a network that treats their users ethically and is resistant to centralized actors behaving badly in the name of monetization, those bills always come due eventually. It's a really interesting experiment, though, and I've been enjoying watching it happen; they're good people and they're trying some really fascinating stuff.
But I really think that in general, we need more online social spaces that are run with goals other than "make as much money as humanly possible, roll around on your giant piles of gold". There's a reason I will always help out anybody who's trying to start a new independent social space for free as much as I can! I want there to be more places like DW, where we're not trying to be everything to everybody or accumulate a gajillion users, we just want to keep a nice chill hangout spot alive for anyone who wants it. And we really appreciate everybody who likes the way we roll and wants to make sure we stick around.
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The less said about Xwitter the better, heh. On a personal level I'm really digging Bluesky -- I like what they're trying to achieve and a lot about the team really reminds me of the early days of LJ, both in the sense of "trying wild technical and social experiments, seeing what sticks" and "oh god we're a team of 20 people and we can't keep up with demand because the internet has arrived en masse", heh. (The entire team has also been extremely gracious about listening to me backseat drive them!) The speed of it is definitely not for everyone, though, and there's still the open question of how they're going to be able to reach sustainability; they went with the VC funding route, and even though I genuinely believe the team is sincere in their intent to create a network that treats their users ethically and is resistant to centralized actors behaving badly in the name of monetization, those bills always come due eventually. It's a really interesting experiment, though, and I've been enjoying watching it happen; they're good people and they're trying some really fascinating stuff.
But I really think that in general, we need more online social spaces that are run with goals other than "make as much money as humanly possible, roll around on your giant piles of gold". There's a reason I will always help out anybody who's trying to start a new independent social space for free as much as I can! I want there to be more places like DW, where we're not trying to be everything to everybody or accumulate a gajillion users, we just want to keep a nice chill hangout spot alive for anyone who wants it. And we really appreciate everybody who likes the way we roll and wants to make sure we stick around.