By now you’ve probably at least heard about Ello. It’s the new “Anti-Facebook” social network. No ads, no name policies and well, no privacy either.

The simple platform is still in beta but over the past few days, the site has exploded, as users hand out invites to pretty much everyone. I signed up about a 16 days ago and there weren’t too many users at the time, relatively speaking. Very few that I knew, and a couple of celebs. It’s always interesting to see celebs post on a new network and have NO comments. However, Ello gained a
ton of traction following Facebook’s latest push to ban people not using real names. The drag queen nation led the march out of town, as most don’t use their birth names for performing. Following in their high heeled footsteps, were many other performers and people who feel safer using a pseudonym. Ello has no rule (as of yet) about what name you choose, so many people started going there.

What you find when you get there, however, is nothing like Facebook. It’s very bleak, very simple, and a little clunky at this point. There are no “Likes” or hearts or anything to indicate your agreement with a post, other than a comment box. The other thing to remember when you post – EVERYTHING YOU POST IS PUBLIC. You have a friend list and a “Noise” list, but what you post doesn’t go to just one list or the other, it goes to everyone who can look up your username. Ello has released a notice that more privacy settings are coming, including ways to block, and flag people. Also private messaging is supposedly on the way.

Something else that’s a little foreign to people who are used to the Facebook comment threads, is the way you’re notified (or not notified) when someone @’s you. You get an email. There doesn’t seem to be a way to find your mentions any other way, apart from reading every comment and post. And speaking of email notifications.. Ugh. My inbox over the past few days, has been nearly nothing but “so and so is now following you” messages from Ello. Most are people I don’t know, and I’m assuming a ton of them are spam or bots already.

But it’s not all bad. You can post large images (which I like), you can post animated gifs (which some people won’t like) and do some formatting with your text.  The simplicity is also sort of nice, compared to the million settings in Facebook and things Google makes you opt out of if you don’t like it on G+. The thing to keep in mind, is that Ello is still very new, and not even public yet. We’ll see if it survives liftoff or dies before the engines even fire.

You can find me at @thelangley on Ello.