@ewenEwen Bell 📸 @mapacheMaho 🦝🍻 I completely agree.
This place is a refuge for me, my mental health is much improved since leaving the commercial data silos.
I remember the brief period when some of the most prominent Left-leaning British political activists (People like Femi, SuperTanski, SteveBray, etc) came over here, and expected everyone to love them the way they did on Twitter.
But they refused to engage, with their fiollowers, only with those they deemed worthy (each other), then flounced out declaring it was dead and went back to Twitter, where they carried on complaining about, erm, Twitter.
I've heard anecdotal stories about US activist-celebrities doing the same thing, which always leads me to doubt their credibility - are they doing this because they believe in their declared activism, or because they are building a brand?
Hint - it's the brand, it's always the brand.
Whereas here, it's always the connections and interactions, as well as the cat/dog/Moopsy pics, the almost indecipherable memes, the hashtagHashtagGames, and the community building.
The longest-running attempt to build a Twitter-style brand I've seen here is George Takei, which most people seem to ignore, and with good reaso - his team mostly post links to articles which are little more than a bit of text and a seemingly endless array of Twitter posts they have ifted.
Yeah, I don't need or want the big names here.