There has been a lot of news, activity, and arguments about the role of Social Media lately.
One of the big things to come out of these arguments, especially when it concerns censorship, control of access, and ownership of data is that current social media applications and systems are primarily owned by single entities and they control all of those things. Sure, they should be clearly stating how they may censor, how they may suppress or promote, and what they will do with your personal data. There is nothing to say this won’t change. In fact, the Terms of Service usually expressly allow the entity owning the platform to change these things whenever they wish.
None of my hats are made of tinfoil, nor do I post anything either important or particularly compelling or controversial on social media. I’m not really concerned about who has the personal data I willingly give to these entities for the convenience of their service. They sell it to advertisers who then advertise to me. This was the deal we entered when I originally signed up for the service.
Twitter became unusable

Long before Mr. Musk got involved, Twitter had become terrible. At least in my experience. I was never a very active tweeter. I did enjoy following some of my friends and some news channels, NASA, and some actors that I enjoyed. Until my timeline became full of tweets from people I didn’t follow. It became so bad that I never saw tweets from some people I did follow. The signal to noise ratio was out of control. Obviously, people and companies who had paid Twitter to have me see their tweets far outweighed the tweets I was actually interested in seeing. I pretty much stopped even opening the twitter app at all and turned off notifications.
Once Mr. Musk acquired Twitter, i decided to open up the app again to see what was going on. It was even worse. Still full of people and companies I had no interest in. Including Mr. Musk’s tweets right at the top of the timeline. I tweeted to the few friends who followed me that I was leaving Twitter and deleted my account a couple of days later.
Enter Mastodon

Being a fan of Open Source Software and of hosting my own servers for fun, I had looked at Mastodon for a while. I even toyed with the idea of spinning up my own Mastodon server. When I began contemplating deleting my Twitter account, I signed up for Mastodon to see what it was like.
Mastodon was pretty much exactly what I wanted Twitter to be. I could even follow my friends who were still on twitter and have their Tweets show up on my timeline thanks to very friendly Twitter bots. My timeline now contains only posts from people or hastags I follow. I can separately take a look at the timeline of posts from everyone on my server. The server I joined is populated by folks who like similar things to what I like, so I have found some new people to follow this way. I can also take a look at what everyone in the FediVerse has tooted (except those filtered out by my server of choice) if I want and follow them.
I looked further into the application that are available in the FediVerse. I record videos of my motorcycle riding and have posted most on Facebook and have experimented with posting them on YouTube. I never really “pulled the trigger” on YouTube and Facebook was not going to cut it for longer form videos I planned to make. Enter PeerTube, the FediVerse equivalent of YouTube. That’s the server I build next.
What about Facebook

I’ve never really had any troubles with Facebook since the beginning of 2009 when I signed up. Over the years I have increased the security as new security settings were added. My Newsfeed has always been a good balance between posts from my friends and “Sponsored” content. My friends see my posts in a timely fashion and I see theirs. The ads are there but not too intrusive. Sometimes the algorithm makes strange choices about what ads I’d like to see. I mark those that are not for me as irrelevant and the Sponsored content actually gets better. I’ll be staying on for the time being. If any of that changes for the worse, I’ll implement the FediVerse version.