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@xieliansbignaturals when Elon bought Twitter, I had a moment of clarity.

AO3 was founded because fanfic kept getting kicked off other platforms. At the time, there was a fandom rallying cry of "we have to own the servers!"

I thought: what if "we have to own the servers!" but social media?

And if so: could I get a project like that started myself?

After a couple of hours of research, I discovered that there were people already on it, who'd been on it for years (fandom.ink, fandom.garden). And I thought: oh, they don't need another fandom instance.

But when I reached out to the admins of both those instances, they were so encouraging and supportive. And I gradually learned the value of a distributed, federated network. The more instances there are, the more robust and versatile the whole system can be.

So I registered blorbo.social domain, asked around for helpers to get it established, found many willing helpers, went through a world of pain for about two weeks (relying heavily on @Tabby for help and support), and two years later I'm so so happy about it.

@xieliansbignaturals I stay here, and have little desire to try any other platforms, cos blorbo.social is kinda tailored to be almost exactly what I want from social media.

I'm really happy that we have a community (on this instance and other fannish instances) where people feel similarly.

Having no ads is huge for me. Ads mess with my brain and make me unhappy.