[a_lieb]

Mastodon/Diaspora seems like a pretty good fit for a small and tightly-knit community like Old School Revival D&D. (Granted I had to Google that acronym to find out what it was, so I can't claim to know much about the subculture. :) )

A few other smaller subcultures have gotten a foothold on Mastodon; it's far from a ghost town. Another upshot is that unlike anything else you listed, it's decentralized and federated, so your instance could never be taken down.

[Pamar]

The problem I have with Mastodon is exactly the same I am encountering with MeWe: when I tell friends/aquaintances that I am moving to MeWe I get the chat/email equivalent of a groan.

Nobody (except a small minority even among techies/geeks/nerds) really want to go through the hassle of joining yet another platform.

Does not matter if it is free, has better quality, finer controls, is federated or not, moderated or not.

I managed, years ago, to convince a decent number of people to follow me on Google+, but the sad reality that now it's either Facebook (which I never created a profile for) or "don't call us, we'll call you...".

[est]

Do you think allowing people post directly without registration would help? (as long as spam was controlled properly)

[Pamar]

Actually, what I would like to have (currently missing from MeWe), is the ability for people to see what I post as "Public" without needing an account to MeWe. Which was, for me, an important feature of Google: if I wanted to broadcast a link or some content I could publish as public (so everyone on Google+ would see it if they visited my profile or were already linked to me) but I could also send the link to the G+ post via email or chat to people who had no Google account and they would still be able to see it (even if they would not be able to comment without logging first). See what I did in this same thread for a public post that I would like to have available on the Internet Archive... it is just a link and you can read it without needing a G+ account.

I proposed it as a per-pay feature to MeWe but so far I only got a canned "thanks for your suggestion" - my main problem is that even what they call "Pages", like the BBC MeWe page is visible only inside the app itself.

[mcv]

Yeah, lack of public posts is a big problem with MeWe. I think they recently added it, but you need to pay for it?

What I would like to see is some general, decentralised standard in the style of email and usenet, where everybody has their own identity they can use to post and respond, and block content from trolls and spammers without them easily circumventing that block (well, that clearly doesn't work with email, but spam filters do a decent job).

[Pamar]

No, you do not to pay for anything but the problem is that "Public" (at least for now) just mean that "if another MeWe user (who isn't already a contact) visits your profile they will be able to see all your posts that you have marked as public".

This helps a bit when you are, for example, deciding if you want to invite them to join your group, or have received a request from them to connect or stuff like that: before that you had only the masthead pic and their nick to decide (as most people do not even bother to fill in their profile).

But [I did test it myself] when you try to copy the url of your MeWe profile or a link to a specific post of yours and open it in a different browser you will be asked to login to MeWe.

"Pages", as I said, despite being designed for special entities like fan clubs, newsagencies and so on, behave the same way: outside of MeWe you cannot access them. They are cheap though (like 3$/month) so my suggestion to MeWe was something like:

"Please allow me to be able to make Public posts available to non-MeWe members. I will be glad to pay for this a monthly fee in the ballpark of what you ask for Pages, and it would be ok if - in case I stop paying - all my Public post revert to the current behaviour (and become visible again outside in case I start paying again)".

Looked reasonable to me, and I understand they are looking for ways to monetize some of the services... except that at the moment you can pay for stuff like "an extra set of emoticons/avatars" or "Activate Night Mode"... :-/

[dallas]

I'm keen on Mastodon/Diaspora but there are loads of non-technical people out there who say things like "looks like the Linux of social" and dismiss it. (The Linux of social? EXCELLENT!)