Say no thanks to MeWe

Originally shared by Isaac Kuo

Say no thanks to MeWe

I do not understand the enthusiasm with which many users being abandoned by a "good" corporation's closed garden are running toward a newbie startup corporation's closed garden.

Oh sure - a startup promises everything and seems very responsive to the customers. They all do. They're not being funded by the customers, they're being funded by VC cash. They try to lock you in while they can, so they can extract value from you later. This is what always happens, because sooner or later the VC's always want their money back and then some (a LOT some).

And you know what? MeWe is going to fail. I mean...there's a small chance it won't, but most startups fail. From the VC's perspective, that's just the price of doing business. Most investments fail, but you get a big payoff from the one that doesn't. That's cool for the VC's, but what good is it for the end users?

For the most part, the end users aren't stupid. For the most part, we avoid getting in deep with dubious startups, and just try to take advantage of freebies while the getting's good. But with this MeWe mass migration, it's like a form of mass stupidity.

The hard truth is that there weren't enough G+ users to justify Google continuing to invest in G+. In terms of raw numbers, there weren't enough of us to keep a Facebook wannabe afloat. Even if we all migrated to MeWe, it would still be a struggling Facebook wannabe.

In contrast, far smaller numbers flooding into diaspora are enough to breath new life into the project. It doesn't have to live or die on high stakes venture capital. Diaspora and Friendica and Mastodon etc have been around through tough times...but without greedy VC's looking to cash the chips in, they have plodded onward rather than folding. The open interoperability means that it's not a closed garden. You can shift from one option to another if one goes down or stagnates.

If you want something future-proof, I'd recommend Hubzilla. It already federates with both the diaspora world (Federation) and the Mastodon world (Fediverse). It offers a unique capability to migrate from one pod to another live - no export/import process required (such as its predecessor, Friendica). Multiple "clones" can be live across pods, meaning that even if one pod goes down you're still up - your followers/followees see no downtime. It's not 100%, since followers/followees in diaspora/Mastodon are pointed to your "clone" on a specific pod, but it's as good as it'll get.

The bottom line is that you'll be part of an open system which has been around the block, and which is resilient to the loss of pods. Your followers/followees don't need to make the same choice as you do - they can use diaspora or Mastodon or whatever.