I was on a Zoom call last night with a bunch of women. The majority of them are at/near retirement age and many of them have YouTube channels with hundreds or maybe even thousands of followers. Most of them also have huge numbers of Instagram followers. The topic of social media came up and someone said “I don’t know what Threads is.” The only response she got was, “It’s Facebook’s answer to Twitter.” I took myself off mute as I tried to think of how to say something about the Fediverse or the Open Web in a way that would land with that audience. The conversation moved on to the difficulty of blocking assholes and trolls if you have an audience of any size before I made up my mind so I just muted myself again.
This seems like a problem.
I would have been really surprised if anyone there mentioned Mastodon, but I was hopeful Bluesky would come up. It did not. Someone did mention not wanting to support Facebook/Meta at all.
