While a few things about “Haven Social” have been promised to be better than your typical proprietary social media app (like the revocable discovery that, even better, you can and should turn off entirely), it is still a silo site. It’s a proprietary and commercial web forum.
I think joining up is a bad idea. I didn’t like Cohost either but this does a lot of things even worse than Cohost did when it comes to governance. I’ve said before that I think this kind of product should be illegal—while I do feel really guilty saying that about an actual real example that some real-life individual programmer is pouring their heart and dreams into, my position hasn’t really changed and today’s dream project is tomorrow’s Zuck steel boot if we don’t watch out.
The name Haven is a li’l misleading because it’s not really a privacy platform like Willow. It’s an Instagram clone with all that that entails except they promise to be good this time (like we’ve heard so many times before—Instagram themselves started out as “good Facebook” which lasted three seconds) and that they’ll send your images through Mist, which you could do yourself before posting on a normal federated platform like ActivityPub. The current world of slop is certainly a bad time and the fact that Haven still defaults to a discovery algorithm makes me pretty pessimistic that they’ll solve it and the world of surveillance an even worse time, among other problems with modern AI. I’m not happy about the art “theft” argument but that’s semantics at this point; big data is the bad guy, we all agree about that.
That’s why I think joining up with a new about-to-become-big data corporation is a really bad idea. Instagram and Facebook and the like weren’t good before LLM and image models either. They were still super bad and evil. It’s like “cars are bad but… our car has fluffy dice”.