Atratus's picture

You Say Goodbye and I Say Ello


So the "exodus" to Ello is the big deal du jour.  Right now, it all bears a striking resemblance to the initial scramble to Google+ that still hasn't really gained traction. There's no real way of knowing at this point. I can hypothesise that the heavy use of mystery-meat navigation and hidden keyboard commands like the existing shift-5 and shift-0 commands is going to turn off the people that already have a hard time working with the obvious and are incapable of subtle. But that might be a good thing, limiting the initial user-base to the clueful. But let's not forget the cries of woe that echo through facebook every time there is a minor change. How will changes to a hard-to-learn interface affect these folks? Will they scurry back to comfortable familiarity of what they know and never be seen again on Ello? Will the current limited usability on tiny phone screens keep the younger crowd away? Will a combination of the two make Ello a niche site for a subset of 30-somethings that fit somewhere inbetween the two? 

And does it matter at all? 

I always have fond hopes that facebook will one day be mySpaced, if only to underline the value of this little project of mine, even as I question that value myself.  There are histories lost on LiveJournal, mySpace, Yahoo!Groups, MSN and more... does any of that matter?