There used to be a time when I was not on Hive. And I was roaming the places like Diaspora, Mastadon, Pump.io's other pods. And it was because I never wanted to give my data to the facebook and other places. I was struggling financially too but a lot of times spending time on facebook seeing my successful friends and family was too much.
So I hit the high way and decided to join the open source world. And managed to be on the places like Friendica, Hubzilla and even the diaspora. And those times is when I managed to find the STEEM and then also later managed to go into the Hive. I kind of had a lot of wandering time on the web.
Open source is a good place. You learn a lot of things on the open source. You meet people who are going to be your temporary allies. And you are supposed to be into a good place once the networking and the work gets you focused on the new things. I wandered into the open source like this and learned a lot how to work around.
Diaspora people have a lot of that common when you are there. A lot of people want to get out of the govt control and they want to have their data on the web but not in the hands of the govt. So they tend to make the choice that being on the diaspora and the friendica is how they manage to be on the side for doing stuff with their content.
Trolls, toxicity and also random bots are going to be there. You have option to block and ignore. I have done a lot of blocking. There are countless leftist people there trying to push their wars, politics and the cancel culture on you. And that just is not something you can ignore or work around with. You have to work with the right amount of the people to get out of such mob attacks.
Diaspora used to be a good place. I met some of the old people too who used to be there after retirement. And they are not there anymore. So there is nothing to go back to and talk to over there. But open source people are still there and they are going to be spending time.