I graduated from high school in 1995. The community I grew up in was incredibly diverse. It was a decent sized city (100k+) and we had about 3,000 students the year I graduated.

That summer, we went to rural Idaho for a family reunion. It was probably the first time in my life that I visited a place that was exclusively white. I’m a white dude myself, but like I said, grew up in a diverse community.

The lack of diversity was a giant culture shock to me. I was in a small community with a population that was about half the size of the school I had just graduated from.

I love what Firefish is attempting to do, but I’m much more impressed with the Ice Cubes app for Mastodon. It works really well and has that ‘twitter’ feel. I’ll be honest, the official Mastodon app just isn’t very good & I think lots of folks have had a bad experience with it. It seems like when they try a 3rd party app, their experience is much better.

One of the things that really enhanced my experience on Mastodon is following hashtags. It allows you to more or less create your own algorithm to see topics you are interested in. It also seems like the importance of hashtags isn’t relayed to new users.

When that weird ass Wagner rebellion went down a few weeks ago, I followed the #wagner, #Prigozhin, and #russia hashtags and the news was just as up to the minute as anything on Twitter was. After the rebellion fizzled out, I just unfollowed the hashtags. I also happened to find some reliable accounts to follow that were knowledgeable about that part of the world.

I’m not even sure that any of those hashtags showed up in the ‘trending tags’ part of my app, though.

Thank you. I figured that was the case.

Exactly why I stopped using Facebook because it was damned near impossible to have a chronological timeline on the app.

I think I was trying to find out about a news event that had recently happened in our community (the community groups in Facebook are still a decent resource for local news) and getting the stupid app to show me a chronological timeline of the group was damned near impossible. I mean, I know it's possible to do it, but it frustrated me to no end that it was turned into a more difficult process than it needed to be.

After that, I said 'screw this place'. I know that we are all the product on Facebook, but I didn't mind surrendering to ads and all that stuff until it became a product that stopped being useful to me.

I can see that.