Livre d'Or

These thoughts are great, thank you for getting so much into the discussion!

The thing about Dreamwidth is that you basically never have to look at the site skin if you hate it, your own pages can be as trendy or as retro as you care to make them. Personally I quite like the 90s look-and-feel (well, my journal has more of an 1890s look-and-feel, tbh!) And some of carisma_sensei and ninetydegrees' layouts are much more modern-looking, even if you don't want to make or commission your own personalized layout. I'm a grumpy old git and I hate pages with huge picture banners in the way of all the content, and all the content in a skinny little central column, and weird scrolling effects. But I could fairly easily cook up a design like that for someone to use on DW, if they wanted to.

In terms of audience, well, some of the Ello enthusiasts are up-to-the-minute design fetishists like the ones who argued with me and emceeaich on Twitter, and sure, DW is never going to attract them (unless it gets big enough to pay a pro web designer). But lots of the people I've seen being enthusiastic are people who are really frustrated with FB and want an equally easy-to-use alternative. They don't love FB because it's visually beautiful or looks modern; it's ugly, old-fashioned even if less so than DW, and visually very cluttered because of the ads. Very good point about Tumblr, though; certainly its featureset is better than Ello's, though these days it's a Yahoo! property it does have advertising.

Expensive data in the US: I don't have a cite, it may just be an incorrect factoid I've picked up. But I have definitely seen stats showing the US lags behind most other rich countries in terms of percentage uptake of smartphones. Anecdotally I've seen friends squeeing about what a great deal they got when they found a $100 a month phone plan; I would balk at paying half that, even with a fancy phone included and unlimited data.

Good point about mothers; that's a very big demographic who really need mobile friendly sites with low interaction barriers!

That's an interesting point about non-Anglophone users on FB being more easily able to hide, as the algorithms are looking for English-typical patterns of potentially "fake" names. I was thinking more of the Google nymwars where people with Asian first names and anglo surnames were getting booted, or people from hippy backgrounds who had dictionary words as names, and any number of people from cultures that don't do the Firstname-Lastname pattern. (Quite apart from the people whose real names, as in the names they are known by IRL, aren't documented by their government bureaucracies.) But I think the whole thing with the drag queens showed up because of the underlying problem that FB enforces its wallet name policy really patchily, and they made a minor tweak which suddenly meant drag queens were targeted whereas before they may have been technically in violation but there was no enforcement. Goodness knows there's plenty of obviously fake names on my FB friend list, including many that are based on English phrases.