I have never been an "online community first" person. The internet is how I stay in touch with people I met in real life. I'm not a "tweet comments at celebrities" guy. I was never funny enough to be the funniest person on Twitter.

So when Twitter was accidentally purchased by a fascist high on ketamine, I moved to Mastodon mostly because it seemed to be “Twitter without the bullshit”. No recommended for you feed, no ads, it was broken in a way I find charming. Of course search was broken because all OSS social tools must have one glaring lack of functionality. In a nightmare world full of constant change it’s good to have a few constants to hold on to.

A lot of the narrative at the time was “this is our flag in the ground in the fight against The Man”. It wasn’t clear in this context if they meant corporations or the media or the weird pseudo celebrity that had taken over social media where people would breathlessly tell me about shit like “Chris-Chan” and “Logan Paul bought a Pokemon card”.

We all need pointless hobbies, but I care about YouTube stars like I care about distant stars dying. It’s interesting to someone somewhere but those people don’t talk to me. I mostly use social media as a place to waste time, not a platform to form para-social relationships to narcissists. I prefer my narcissism farm to table. I’d rather dig a grave with a rusty spoon than watch a Twitch “star”.

Anyway, I watched mostly apathetically as the internet tried to rally itself to another cause. I read my news at the normal newspapers, watched my normal television and put social media off into its own silo. Then Trump effectively shut down the entire free press in the US in a series of bullshit lawsuits.

See I had forgotten the one golden rule of capitalism. To thrive in capitalism one must be amoral. Now you can be wildly sickeningly successful with morals but you cannot reach that absolute zenith of shareholder value. Either you accept a lower share price and don’t commit atrocities or you become evil. There is no third option.

So of course media corporations became bargaining chips for the oligarchs' actual businesses. Why fight a defamation suit when you can settle it by running favorable coverage and maybe bankrupting the media outlet you bought as a stocking stuffer? Suddenly I couldn’t find any reliable reporting about anything in the US. My beloved Washington Post became straight-up propaganda and desperate attempts to cope. "Best winter stews to make while you watch your neighbors get kidnapped at gunpoint." Twelve dollars a month for that.

Threads was worthless because it’s the most boring social media website ever imagined. It’s a social media network designed by brands for brands, like if someone made a cable channel that was just advertisements and meta commentary about the advertisements you just saw. Billions of dollars at their disposal and Meta made a hot new social media network with the appeal of junk mail.

Bluesky had a bunch of “stuff” but they’re trying to capture that 2008 Twitter lightning in a bottle which is a giant waste of time. We’re never going to go back to pretending that tweeting at politicians does anything and everyone there is desperately trying to build a “brand” as the funny one or whatever. I want news I don’t want your endless meta commentary on the news.

People talk a lot about the protocols that power Bluesky vs. ActivityPub, because we're nerds and we believe deep in our hearts that the superior protocol will win. This is adorable. It flies in the face of literally all of human history, where the more convenient thing always wins regardless of technical merit. VHS beat Betamax. USB-C took twenty years. The protocol fight is interesting the way medieval siege warfare is interesting — I'm glad someone's into it, but it has no bearing on my life. There's no actual plan to self-host Bluesky. Their protocol makes it easier to scale their service. That's why it was written and that's what it does. End of story.

Now EU news remained reliable, but sending European reporters into the madness of the US and trying to get a “report” out of it is an exercise in frustration. This became especially relevant for me when Trump threatened to invade Greenland and suddenly there was a distinct possibility that there might be an armed conflict between Denmark and the US. Danish reporters weren’t getting meetings with the right people and it was just endless rumors and Truth Social nonsense.

If the American press had given me 20 minutes of airtime I could have convinced everyone they don’t want to get involved with Greenland. We’re not tough enough as a people to survive in Greenland, much less “take it over”. Greenlandic people shrug off horrific injuries hundreds of kilometers from medical help with a smile. I watched a Greenlandic toddler munch meat from the spine of a seal with its head very much intact. We aren’t equipped to fuck with these people, they are the real deal.

So in this complete breakdown of the press came in the Fediverse. It became the only reliable source of information I had. People posted links with a minimal amount of commentary, picking and choosing the best content from other social media networks. They’re not doing it to “build a brand” because that’s not a thing in the Fediverse. It’s too disjointed to be a place to build a newsletter subscription base.

Instead it became the only place consistently posting trustworthy information I could actually access. This became personally relevant when Trump threatened to invade Greenland, which is the kind of sentence I never expected to type and yet here we are. It would be funny if I wasn't a tiny bit concerned that my new home was going to get a CIA overnight regime change special in the middle of the night.

It was somewhere in the middle of DMing with someone who had forgotten more about Greenland than I would ever know and someone who lived close to an RAF base in the UK that it clicked. This was what they had been talking about. Actual human beings were able to find each other and ask direct questions without this giant mountain of bullshit engagement piled on top of it. Meta or Oracle or whoever owns TikTok this week couldn't stop me.

I never expected to find my news from strangers on a federated social network that half the internet has never heard of. I never expected a lot of things. But there's something quietly beautiful about a place where people just... share what they know. No brand deals, no engagement metrics, no algorithm nudging you toward rage. Just someone who spent twenty years studying Arctic policy posting a thread at 2 AM because they think you should understand what's happening. It's the internet I was promised in 1996. It only took thirty years and the complete collapse of American journalism to get here.

Find me at: https://c.im/@matdevdug