Mostly because the "damn this is interesting" to "i don't care what you ate yesterday" ratio is not good enough to spend my time on it. These days I am much more enjoying exploring gopher holes, reading and writing blog posts. For realtime communications, I prefer IRC. For me, social media sits in between chatting and publishing content and is therefore neither fish nor fowl.
Very cool but I would like to be able to create an account with my mail address instead of using a Mastodon account because I am trying to avoid social media.
Anything can be taken from you at any time. Google can also just delete your account for no obvious reason. I guess that a domain can also be taken away but maybe not that easy. At least you can switch mail providers easily without having to change all your accounts that are based on your mail address.
I might be missing the point as this only aims at the title but I still own a 5 1/4" floppy disk with the first software I ever wrote as a child. It was a disk label printer software written in BASIC on a C64 and has a label on it printed on a Star LC-10 C. The silly main feature was some sprites flying through the title screen.
This software has a soul - at least by my definition.
Nice! I made my first LEO sat contact also in the garden with an arrow yagi and a cheap HT. It was fun but I prefer operating the easy way and building a nice station. Some neighbours watched me making this first contact and they now speak to me differently...
Last October, I had the honor of making such contact with the ISS. I posted about this on my website here: https://rz01.org/na1ss/
The ISS has radios on board that allow amateur radio operators to send and receive APRS messages, talk to other hams via their built-in FM repeater or to receive SSTV images. They also have amateur TV stuff on board but I have not explored this yet. Crew members with an amateur radio license can pick up the mic of the radio that acts as a FM repeater to make contacts with other hams on the earth.