If you're not paying for a service, you're the product being sold.

Ello should take off the way Linux on the desktop did...

Ello is just like Diaspora, but you have to pay for Ello's marking department.

Diaspora is free, non-profit, ad-free, allows anonymous users, and won't censor. And it's open source code so anyone can set up a Diaspora server (or "pod") and add to the decentralized nature of it.

https://joindiaspora.com/

@3 I remember Diaspora! Just kidding, I don't. But yes, Ello will be just like that.

You'll pry my Friendster account out of my cold dead hands.

I have an Ello account, and so far a mere handful of my roughly 500 FB Friends have joined up. But, like other similarly touted "anti-FB" SM apps, I just don't see this one achieving anything close to the critical-mass of defections required to knock FB off its perch; most users simply don't seem to care enough about privacy issues or ad-bots invading their posts to feel compelled to switch from something with which they're already familiar, and that all of their friends are still using.

Ello is just the flavor-of-the-month, like all the others before it (seriously, how many people actually use their G+ account on a regular basis? Let alone Telegraph? Xanga?), and once all the excitement dies down, it'll settle into a stable regular user level of a few million at most.

@3 Sounds like a haven for child abusers, KKK types and MRAs.

Is it functionally any different from Tumblr? Looks a hell of a lot like it to me.

GeoCities or GTFO

Linux is on the desktop of 90% of all the few hundred computers on my floor, so I guess that means I should get Ello then.

Just download Adblock and go back to Facebook where everyone is already there waiting for you. Nothing simple or minimalist about adding yet another damn social thing that you have to check.

GABBO GABBO GABBO!

So far three great things about Ello: 1) anyone can be named anything. 2) anyone can post anything. so many butts! so many sweet sweet butts. 3) I'm on Ello, and not on Facebook...

So far one not so great thing about elli: because Ello has gone viral in the last few days, they've had to block new accounts for the moment.

I heard about Ello and sGrouples (another new social media site) at the same time. I'm not bothering with Ello at this point - any website that doesn't make privacy a priority from day one is not going to be any better than FB in the long run. sGrouples, on the other hand, has made privacy its primary selling point. They do plan to have ads in the future, but the idea is that they'll just let us choose the type of ads we want to see, rather than being all creepy and trying to figure it out based on our posts, likes, etc. I can respect that - they have to make money somehow.

I like the basic structure, although there's some rather crucial functionality that's missing at this point. (For example, you can create an open group, but there's no way for people to search for groups.) It also lets you read your FB newsfeed via their site and post to FB at the same time you post to sGrouples, which helps when most of your friends are still doing FB. (You don't get the FB notifications, sadly, otherwise I'd have no reason to use FB directly at all.)

Diaspora tried and failed at this already. If you want people to switch social networks you better be able to match feature for feature out of the gate along with additional incentive features.

@11:

Agreed, and upload Social Fixer as well; between the two they solve about 90% of the annoyances caused by FB's constant fuckery.

DOWN. Download.

Eh, I'll just use fetlife.

@8 It has a lot in common with Tumblr, but it lacks many of Tumblr's features. For example, a secondary Tumblr account can be password-protected and the Tumblr queue is very useful if you want to create a blog that updates on a set schedule. Ello also has a strict no-porn policy and a more restrictive set of speech limits than most sites. That's not to bash Ello. Ello is way too new to know whether it'll develop into something good or not. I think it could go either way. But it's lacking a lot of useful features right now, and I would not call its interface user-friendly (when looking for information about Ello, I found it simpler to do a Google search than to go to Ello's site and use its own links - that is not a good sign). But so many sites start off kind of crappy, but develop well, and so many sites start off kind of crappy and die in obscurity. They have some good intentions, but it'll depend on whether they code in important features and whether the no porn rule and how they enforce that turns out to be too much of a barrier.

Their lack of data mining would be nice if they had protected posts. Until they do, it's kind of a sick joke. We won't mine your data, but we'll let Google do it, since all posts and comments are public. If privacy is their main selling point, then they really need to work on creating the features for people who value privacy. If they do that, there might be enough of a base of users who value privacy to have it gain some real usage.

sweet, sweet butts...

The Search function initially stumped me too, until I happened to click the big heading that said "Search" and discovered that *that* is the space to type in your search. It's clever but a bit *too* minimalist at the moment, as we expect a heading to be just text or maybe a link, but not a functional input space as well. It needs a better indicator.

@19 "Ello also has a strict no-porn policy and a more restrictive set of speech limits than most sites."—Author Violet Blue called them out on Twitter last night regarding their no-porn policy, and they responded that it wasn't supposed to say that anymore, they just hadn't yet updated the policy. They since have done so; it now says not to post explicit material without flagging it NSFW, which will screen it from people who don't want to see it. They also say the NSFW flagging is still in development, so the new policy will go into effect when that's done; they don't actually say what people are supposed to do in the meantime.

@22 Very interesting. They are being very responsive to complaints, which is a good sign. I will watch and be curious to see how it develops.

Like most social users, I'm curious about Ello. And like some, I joined. I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. At the moment, Ello is a free, closed-source social network, with no export tools or an API and is somewhere between a hipster facebook and a really cool friendster. It's completely bare and unintuitive to maneuver around at the moment, mostly because it’s in beta. People aren't really sure what they "should" be doing, there's no like button, and it doesn't play nice with third party applications. But you know what? It's kind of refreshing. The white space is sort of relaxing and there's absolutely no need to check your phone every hour. In fact, there's not even an app for it. I'm still skeptical if it will last. And even more so that their stance against ads can't, and won't, be bought at some point. But for now I'm going to stick with it. If you're interested in not seeing where I've been checked in, what Harry Potter character I would be, or receive Candy Crush invites, feel free to follow me ello.co/@ronnietravels

Wake me up when ReaganSpace is rebooted.