Ok let's be honest. I like the fediverse because it caters to me. I have huge technical privilege. I've been writing code and making games and building computers and setting up websites and all those sorts of things since I was a child — and I find doing all those things fun. For me I've set up microblog.pub as a single person activitypub/fediverse/mastodon instance because then I can play with it. I spend hours tweaking my css to make the site look how I want. I contribute patches and discussions to the help build, improve, and add features to the microblog.pub software that I use. All of that is a source of joy for me. But that's me.

Most people don't have my technical privilege. Most people just want a social media platform that will do the job of connecting them to their networks and showing them the content they're looking for.

And I can yell and shout about how #indieweb or fedi/masto/AP is better than platforms for this that or the other reason. And I do genuinely believe in those open platforms for those reasons. But those reasons aren't why I love them. I love them because the open systems are empowering to me, specifically, because of my technical privilege and because they provide a space for me to play in the way I like to play.

What sucks, though, is that this is about community. There are plenty of things in life where if you want to do things your weird way that's different to everyone else, you can do that and have your fun and it doesn't actually matter what other people think. But that's not true for social networking. If everyone else has different wants, needs, and priorities from their social network and thus chooses to do something else from what your wants, needs, and priorities direct you to choose, then your experience of doing the thing you choose is lessened by the fact that your communities don't join you.

So I'm left stressed. I deeply love open platforms. I love the web. I want other people to love it too and to come join me playing there. But I also totally understand why the touted benefits of those platforms don't even remotely make up for the poor UX to people who just want the social media to work. It's all well and good to be invested in the community project of building the network but not everyone has the desire or the resources to be part of that kind of project. So I'm anxious because I know that it IS better for most of my friends to use something else. It makes more sense for them to go to a platform that is all owned by and managed by a single legal entity because that is what provides the most value for the least cost (difficulty of use). But then my playground is lessened. And I recognise that that playground was only ever fun for me and not most of my friends, because of that technical privilege,. But it still makes me anxious and it still makes me sad. Cause I want to keep playing.