@silverpill @icedquinn @fish @phnt @sampler @strypey @light

> I believe that in case of a network split almost all developers and users will defect to the Mastodon side, even those who are making fun of Mastodon today.

Almost all users are on Facebook or Twitter. Fedi is a tiny, tiny speck by comparison. "More users" doesn't mean "better fedi".

:gnujihad: It is true that Gab didn't have a lot of hackers, but I've never heard someone discuss Pleroma's "user acquisition strategy".

Numbers don't mean a lot if they're not qualified. If most of the webshits go to Mastodon and the weird hackers stick on the rest of fedi, the rest of fedi is where I'd like to be. Most developers are on Busky and Twitter. Most users are on Twitter. Facebook has more users than that.

> It's not going to be like Gab.

:gnujihad::smug2::blacksam:

> I don't expect it to happen within the next 2-3 years.

Sure. Bridge crossed when came to.

> And obviously, I don't think that we should be especially concerned about being cut off from the Mastodon Network. I am talking about building a viable alternative.

Then I'm not sure what you mean.

I would like everyone that wants to be free to be free. I am less interested in trading that to accommodate a larger number of people. First thing, I intend to have a place for myself: I am going to be somewhere. There are people like me and I can be in the place with those people. There are people that want a place that is not like the place I want; I don't need to be in the same place as them.

Monterey Park has some of the best Chinese food in the US. Wonderful place, fun to just wander around. There's nowhere quite like that area. So even after I moved up to Arcadia, when I went somewhere to eat, I'd usually go somewhere around Monterey Park, Alhambra. The city council in Monterey Park was trying to increase tax revenue by bringing in more franchises: they wanted an Applebee's and a TGI Friday's. This got shat on by the people that lived there because the reason they lived in Monterey Park was that it was Monterey Park. If it turned into Irvine or whatever, there'd be no reason to live in Monterey Park. And for people that didn't live there, there was a reason to go to Monterey Park: it was unique. There's no reason to go to Irvine (unless you want to see the world's first beige Walmart--city building codes, all buildings are beige, all signs are brown, so this was the first Walmart to not have a grey-blue facade and blue sign). But the Beijing Pie House was in Monterey Park. Late-night meat-skewers place I went to with fluffy. Hot pot places, tea shops, etc. Things unique to the western half of the San Gabriel Valley. So people that lived in Monterey Park didn't want it, people that visited Monterey Park didn't want it, but the city council did, because it was much more tax revenue than the noodle stands.

Now, I left Twitter in 2016. At that point, it was largely carried by momentum, so I left later than I should have. All of the reasons I joined Twitter to begin with were present on fedi, and more: I could hack shit, I could talk to the other people that were hacking shit. Here we are: we wouldn't be having this conversation if we were just Twitter users. There's a reason to be on fedi: the hackers and artists and weirdos are here. I don't have a tenuous place, because I'm here as long as I run the pipes. That eliminates an entire class of reasons to second-guess myself when I speak. And everyone here is like that. No one's really worried about saying something that gets them shadowbanned. This is a unique and wonderful place. If glowies want to coopt it and use "but you can't diverge from *Mastodon*", I'm not budging a goddamn inch, and I'm going to encourage people that value fedi to do the same. "Shittier version of Twitter" isn't the network I joined. I have put money and time and work into fedi and Rochko and Gleason and Pincus and Kissane and Jaz-Michael King and Even Projomout and the rest of them can eat shit if they want to turn fedi into a worse hell than the one I left when I finally bailed on Twitter.

So, that's my flag planted: :gnujihad: