:bread:

„Where is the main course?“ – While facilitating a workshop within a youth exchange with a French group I was asked to explain the concept of German „Abendbrot“[evening bread meal].

bread

Having bread with cheese or sausages is quiet convenient, but not exactly what I personally feel beste with. Bread, regardless if plain white or whole wheat doesn’t really ever fed me up very well. So I changed my eating habits and try to avoid bread (alongside with other short-chained carbohydrates) for six times a week. Saturday remains a cheat day, where bread, which I still really love from a taste perspective, has a prominent role. I grew up with bread and love its variety, which it doesn’t necessarily has everywhere, but which it most certainly got in Germany. (Or used to had.) I love to bake bread, too.

Even if I prefer to have some veggies, some eggs, meat or legumes for breakfast, dinner and supper (or Abend„brot“), bread is still of greater value and has a positive connotation for me. And yes. Probably for most people who grew up in Germany. People like those who started to cultivate the bread emoji on the social network ello.co:

ello bread emoji.

Meanwhile a (pretty boring, stereotypical and dumb movie by BuzzFeedVideo explained ello’s :bread: meme (just skip to the last ten seconds):

Ello.co – simple, beautiful, ad-free and beta.

Ello.co – Screenshot

The last social media service, I got (at least) a little excited about has been tent.is (now cupcake.io), used by about a dozen people. The concept to build an open protocol as a fundament for many services seemed noble and for me it was much more appealing than diaspora.

Well, ello.co isn’t open, but it’s as its claim is promising: simple, beautiful and ad-free.

As some people wished for Twitter and as app.net tried, ello aims to build its business model around Freemium:

From time to time we offer special features to our users. If we create a special feature that you like, you can choose to pay a very, very small amount of money to add it to your Ello account forever.

We’ll see, how that works out. Ello is currently very beta and thus lacks of a lot of features (some of them gotta be free) and it’s vividly discussed on elli, if its minimalistic (featureless) state isn’t also a strength of ello. For example there is currently nothing like retweests or shared items that spam the timeline.

Reactions on Ello about Ello vary between: wake me up as soon as it’s working and take good care about Ello, it already grow dear on my heart. I will definitely try to keep faith with Ello for a while, since not only it’s minimalism is a a nice change to Facebook and Twitter, also noise is virtually banned in a separate tab. And while I manage Twitter pretty well with private lists and am quite thankful for Facebook’s arbitrary filtering, on both channels there is still a lot of automated content, ads, spam, noise and redundancy on those channels. If not for more: it’s pretty relaxing to follow just a couple dozen people who are – yet – pretty attentive on what they post. And it has been a great opportunity to just follow a couple new pepz, I didn’t already knew from elsewhere, which has is own appealing.

Long story short: My first impression of Ello is quiet pleasant. Yes, it’s very beta. But it is very neat, very unobtrusive and most def got some potential. … Good Luck, Ello. Hopefully you don’t end up too soon on this list of services I actually really liked to use, but which I don’t really use anymore: