If people wanted the bird app, they would have already got the bird app, if they don't like the bird app, they would have got a Mastodon account.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn't doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can't force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
I should have been more specific, what I meant was "people who want to use a microblogging platform but don't like who's running the bird app. "
But I would say reddit is mainstream enough that random 40 year olds probably has heard of it now, after all the large big profile celebrity AMAs, it's the 10th most visited site in the world and 6th in the US.
And Misskey is mostly Japanese artists who need more privacy. Hence, Misskey is a Japanese product, and Japanese Twitter refugees might find Misskey useful. People should join any other Misskey instance instead, if Misskey.io is full.
There was ridiculous Q shit on reddit before Qanon became popular. In fact, that’s the first place I ever heard of it. I came upon a sub called, I think, cbts_radio (for “calm before the storm”) and was just like, what the fuck is this? It was a sub for off-topic casual discussion split off from the original cbts sub, and it was filled with the most ridiculous anti-Democrat/Hillary Clinton screechy conservative bullshit I’d ever seen. Qanon didn’t enter the public awareness for another couple of years after that.
Google+ had more than one thing wrong with it. Just for example ...
The precursor to Google+ was called Google Buzz, and it was rolled out to Gmail users in a way that exposed privacy & security problems with Gmail contacts. This led to a lawsuit and a settlement which Google had to obey when releasing their next "social media" attempt.
As a result, Google+ became a heavy-handed effort that tried to hew closely to the settlement's privacy & consent requirements while assimilating seemingly-unrelated projects such as YouTube comments.
It feels like the same reason that Reels isn’t doing well, people who wanted TikTok would have already got TikTok, you can’t force Instagram users to like Twitter/TikTok but on their Insta account instead.
I'm never going to download or sign up for TikTok. I know Meta isn't really that great as far as privacy goes, but at least they don't share information directly with the CCP. Fuck the CCP. IG Reels works just fine for me. I actually can't stand the IG home feed because of the algorithm showing me what it wants to show me instead of a chronological timeline of the posts of the people I follow, so I mostly just use IG for stories and Reels.
Why? Isnt a government that directly affects you a more immediate problem? Sure we're not authoritarian, but the things the FBI, ATF, CIA, NSA, ETC have done sure look like it.
Yeah I hate that curated list bullshit. It made both FB and YouTube worse, too. And both were intended to manipulate users into spending more time there. Ironically, I haven't been on as many YouTube dives into the random following interesting videos from the recommended ones since they started curating their list based on what you've previously watched (and seemingly picking one or two of them to tunnel vision on).
YouTube used to work by showing you videos that other people who watched that video watched, which was really great for music discovery. Now it shows me things that I already watched with a small sprinkling of new things. The front page still suggests things I haven’t seen before related to things I watched. I think they were pressured to make that change because it was taking impressionable people too quickly down rabbit holes of extremism… seems like it still does though.
Unless you live in China, are a Chinese national, or have someone living in China who could be used to blackmail you, then you shouldn't care much about what data the CCP has on you.
Meta shares data with the NSA and likely any other US allies, so that might be a slight concern if you live in any country like that.
Lemmy makes all its data essentially free for everyone to grab, so... Hi CCP, Hi NSA, Hi CIA, Hi MI6, Hi FSB...