I pay a monthly fee to a business for my mail server, and I chose a business that makes data privacy a top selling point.
Tweets are microblogs. RSS technology is fine for publishing them. The Twitter client only needs to be an RSS reader. Replies, retweets, and likes are empty calories for end users. They're the engagement bait social media uses to power an attention economy.
The fediverse copied the wrong features. There's no point for it to have an attention economy because no one is monetizing the attention. Therefore there's no need for the empty calorie features, and no need for my data to be on someone else's server.
> I pay a monthly fee to a business for my mail server, and I chose a business that makes data privacy a top selling point.
And you're free to pick a mastodon instance that offers the same (if that's something you cared to do). Do you also complain that it's possible for any rando can spin up their own email server and start passing out free email addresses?
Your perspective on "empty calories" social engagement is very narrow in my opinion, because you seem to equate all social interactions by the measure of existing, objectively bad, services. I think that over time the rise of small indie servers that will work on a social graph but in a similar way to email, will prove that "meaningful" social networks can exist, and my personal hope is that they won't be focusing on monetization. I don't see any reason why companies won't be able to build on that and offer you the same guarantees about your data that your email company gives you.
My position is that anonymous conversation is low value and a more advanced internet society will not do it much. The "meaningful" social networks you theorize will be meaningful specifically because anonymous conversation is absent. If someone posts something interesting I'll DM them about it somehow because I'll know them well enough to do that. Replying on Twitter is the equivalent of sending Reply-All emails to the whole company.
Yet here we are doing just fine having that anonymous conversation. It won't change your life, but I bet you found out a thing or two from this thread.
Tweets are microblogs. RSS technology is fine for publishing them. The Twitter client only needs to be an RSS reader. Replies, retweets, and likes are empty calories for end users. They're the engagement bait social media uses to power an attention economy.
The fediverse copied the wrong features. There's no point for it to have an attention economy because no one is monetizing the attention. Therefore there's no need for the empty calorie features, and no need for my data to be on someone else's server.