Ello, mate!
I've been using Ello for a while and really enjoy it. It's attractive and reminds me of Tumblr without the annoying 200 levels of attributions. For a while people thought Ello would be a substitute for Facebook but not really, and if you think that and don't try to build your account, you'll be bored. It's difficult to find your old Facebook/Twitter/Google+ friends there because for the most part, people make up new names for themselves.
However, I have a few friends there, mostly from the Ello community itself, the podcasting realm, and also an old friend from Livejournal (if he sees this he may wish to comment). Ello is good to recommend active accounts to you and you can find really interesting stuff there. And suddenly there's been drama.
I started following a very active poster on Ello and apparently that person created a bunch of alternate joke accounts with a food theme, which is an old, established thing to do. A lot of people on Livejournal did it. A lot of people on Myspace certainly did it. Twitter is full of joke accounts. Facebook frowns on it, but I think there's nothing wrong with it as long as it's just to make the world a more amusing place. (I've been burned by an alternate Facebook account where I blocked one of the accounts and that person came after me on an alternate, but that's another thing altogether and part of the reason I am taking a Facebook break).
I don't know what else that person on Ello did, but his or her account has been grayed out and is in fact represented with a gray circle. And as a follower on that Ello account, I too was blocked by somebody. So I'm boggled. I'm nothing but nice on Ello. I'm not even political. Mostly I post funny old retro kitch. Seriously.
Social media is entertaining, that's for sure, and nothing is more entertaining to folks on social media than drama. I remember back in the early oughts, when the original owners of Livejournal ran out of server space, and to buy some time while they raised money, they enacted invite codes, which ironically, actually made LJ more popular than ever. At the time, I was active on two different Rocky Horror shadow casts, and the two casts barely got along and in fact, certain members on each cast hated certain other members, and vice versa (this continues to this day, though none of the people on the casts are even involved in Rocky Horror anymore). So this one cast I was on sort of used LJ for socializing among its people and even did their show casting here. And I was at a cast meeting for the second cast, where some of the more hated members asked me if I had any LJ codes, because they wanted on as well. So I gave them to them. No big deal right? WRONG. Certain members of the first cast were very angry and said SOMEBODY gave out codes and it was THEIR turf and that was not allowed. They never figured out who it was but it was me (I suspect they thought it was me because I was in both groups so I was always getting the stinkeye anyway, but they were right).
Heck, I got knocked off a few LJ friends list back in the day for being opposed to our involvement in the Iraq War (and fuck those folks. I was right!). But then again, I got blocked by a ton of folks on Facebook for feeling that Treyvon Martin was murdered too, so fuck all that.
I don't really like drama. But man, some people do.