Dear Fedi friends,

[wjmaggos@liberal.city]

@_elena

it's #DemocracyOfReach.

freedom of speech is not enough if the wealthy determine who gets attention. decentralized social media can displace them, allowing the public to collectively decide what information, ideas and art goes viral. based purely on human boosts. no owners, no algos, no ads. that's the revolutionary potential here. while there's other ways to find and participate in community and be entertained, nothing else can do this. nothing else can so empower all the people.

[icewolf@masto.brightfur.net]

@_elena I really like the culture of consent and respect. CWs let you give people notice before blasting them with political shit, or severe depression or anxiety attacks, or just plain old lewdposting. Or spoilers. Or the punchline to a joke!

I also really love how public doesn't mean Public. When you make a post, it doesn't instantly go to the entire world at once. It just goes to the servers your server knows, and then if someone boosts it, the servers their server knows, etc. Things bubble outward naturally.

This means you get real communities on here in a way that's probably harder on a more centralized site. I'm in a big furry bubble, which rocks. But there's also a large contingent of Firstname Lastname Human Fedi and we see them occasionally but it's not like, constant.

It also really cuts down on harassment when the trolls/queerphobes/anti-furry haters/whoever just don't even know your server exists, and/or have been blocked. They can go be hateful in their little hate bubble. :3

Oh yeah that's another thing. "You're allowed to say anything you want, but people don't have to listen" is actually a thing here! Nobody's censoring the nasty people, they can and do still exist in their little corner. But nobody talks to them. And this wasn't some decision handed down from on high, it's just that all the admins of the servers in our region of fedi went "nah, go away" and blocked them. We didn't have to block them (we selfhost our own server and are our own admins), we just never ran into them 'cause we keep a low profile and don't federate much.

Speaking of... if you're queer, furry, marginalized, or otherwise a target for being banned for no reason in corporate places – around here, you can find a server ran by someone like you, full of people like you. That gives you both community /and/ assurance that you won't get banned just for being yourself. Even if the credit card companies push to get you labeled Evil and scrub you from existence. (...I wish I was joking.)

There's a lot of good here that comes out of it being (unlike Bluesky) truly decentralized.

[willow@chaosfem.tw]

@_elena

The Fediverse is a great place to learn about queer identities and anti-capitalism stuff that the super rich don’t want you to know about.

Plus it’s a pretty solid dating app.

[wizardofdocs@wandering.shop]

@_elena Mastodon is unique because it doesn't sell me anything or prevent me from seeing what I've asked it to show me. If I see advertising, it's for real things, posted by their creators, who are people I have chosen to follow, or that they have chosen to follow. Mastodon lets me build trust with others in a way other platforms no longer do.

[nobsagile@mastodon.social]

@_elena My biggest plus: No Algorithm. That is the main reason why we have really good content here!

[ciela@mastodon.ie]

@_elena what makes fedi special is that it helped me to move away from my big social addiction and showed me that a social media system without ads and algorithm is possible.

[faraiwe@mstdn.social]

@_elena I grew up with Web1.0, a free garden of oddities, trivia, useful bits of tech knowledge, weird and wonderful stuff, which was maybe limited by scant access, and tech-savvy required.

Web2.0 ("AOL") created walled gardens, where sheeple were allowed to see and go only where corporate goons wanted them to. Web3.0 monetized and enshittified that.

The #fediverse is Web1.0+, the freedom to access wonderful stuff, free of corps oversight... now with obscene broadband and storage/processing =D

[thibaultamartin@mamot.fr]

@_elena Le Fediverse est le dernier coin de tranquillité, imperméable au marketing dans un Internet rendu inhospitalier par les Big Tech.

Ce sont nos potagers qu’on cultive et où on se détend entre voisins, là où le reste de la ville est pollué par les publicités et manipulations de Meta et consorts.

[fresseng@universites.social]

@_elena

La porte de la Fediverse, c'est une communauté bien à soi, que l'on peut s'approprier à sa façon et selon ses propres besoins sans en déléguer le contrôle à autrui, tout en restant connecté aux autres communautés et à leurs membres, dans le respect des valeurs et des besoins de chacunes et chacuns.

[cazabon@mindly.social]

@_elena

Nothing fancy, but here's my take.

I've been on the 'net since it was called Arpanet. When the commercial social networks first came around, I was already jaundiced enough that their future business model - advertising, surveillance, exploitation, extraction - was obvious and inescapable.

So I never signed up for any of them. No Facebook, Twitter, or even any of the early ones. Sometimes I knew I was missing out on something that others weren't, but the costs didn't outweigh the benefits.

When Fedi came around - decentralized, independent, non-commercial, ungovernable, cooperative - I finally knew I could join something "social".

I love it here.

[thomas@metalhead.club]

@_elena the Fediverse allows me to choose what I will see (and why). It feels like a more natural way of social networking than the other platforms.

[armavica@social.sciences.re]

@_elena Le Fédivers, c'est le seul vrai réseau social. Ces deux mots sont importants. C'est un réseau parce que c'est décentralisé, il n'y a pas de point central (à la différence de Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, etc, où tout le monde se connecte au même site). C'est social parce que ça appartient à tout le monde et à personne, et surtout pas à une seule personne ou entreprise. C'est donc une place publique, pas un espace privé. De plus, le code est ouvert : tout le monde peut le lire et le modifier, et vérifier l'absence d'algorithmes de recommandations automatiques, de censure ou de mise en avant de certaines opinions. On ne lit que ce que l'on choisit de lire.
On entend parfois parler de tentatives d'interdire l'accès aux réseaux sociaux avant un certain âge, mais on se trompe de cible. Les problèmes qui y règnent ne sont pas intrinsèques aux réseaux sociaux, ils sont intrinsèques aux entreprises qui les détiennent. L'économie de la publicité et de la surveillance : c'est ça qui est à la source de la plupart des problèmes des plateformes appartenant aux big tech. Les gens resteront dépendants à ces plateformes (puisqu'elles sont conçues pour cela) quelque soit l'âge auquel ils les rejoignent. Au contraire, le Fédivers est la preuve que sans ces motivations sous-jacentes, Internet est un endroit bien plus agréable et fréquentable.

[psoul@sfba.social]

@emeline @_elena ou Émeline! Merci encore !

[mistergibson@turtleisland.social]

@_elena I'm on running from surveillance capitalism.

[hikingdude@mastodon.social]

@_elena Le Fédivers construit des ponts — entre les humains. Ici, je ne suis ni un utilisateur, ni un point de données, ni une cible marketing. Je suis simplement moi. Et le Fédivers n’a pas été conçu pour le profit, mais pour nous.

It's hard m there's so much good to say about the fediverse...