In many ways, Mastodon feels like rewinding the clock on social media back to the early days of Twitter and Facebook. On the consume side, that means that your home feed has no algorithm (this can be disorienting at first).
Practically, it means that you see only what you want to see and only see it linearly. You never wonder “why am I seeing this and how do I make it go away?”. Content can only enter your home feed via your followed tags or handles and the feed is linear like the early days of social media.
Absolutely agree with your comment.
I don’t really know the solution either… I can’t afford to pay for all the things I enjoy online.
I was considering supporting 1 Twitch streamer I enjoy until I saw subscription cost. And if I paid that for every streamer or YouTuber I enjoy, I’d be broke in a single day lol.
I get so much incredibly good info and discussions online about my hobbies, all for no charge.
I used to subscribe on Patreon to my most useful resources/people, but in the end I just could afford it and had to cancel all my Patreon
I hate ads but I don’t understand how the internet would function without ads. No one could afford it
Yeah, I’m not rich enough to pay for every site and service either. A site like rockpapershotgun I left when it paywalled most of its contents, it wasn’t important enough to me to pay for. I’ve never paid for reddit, but i probably should have by how much i used it. Not that I will do that after what they’ve pulled lately. I donate to a fediverse server to put my money where my mouth is and at least pay for what I want to keep alive.
It would take some adjustment, but ads and data harvesting are the core problem to the enshiftification of the entire internet. You can’t have it both ways. We have this endless game of cat and mouse where we keep moving to the next platform after the last one becomes unusable due to ads and data harvesting.
You have to draw the line somewhere to end this pointless cycle and it is either pay for software and services or have people do only what they want to when they want to (FOSS). It really doesn’t cost that much if it isn’t attempting to compete with other software that grew with ad and data harvesting money.