I’ve been asked on TV hits and interviews lately to explain why decentralized social media is better, especially re: Mastodon.

[too_little_caffeine@dotnet.social]

@taylorlorenz Identity and authority. If our public services or even brands were to set up their own instances on domains that they control then they are incredibly hard to spoof.

If a post comes from a handle at news.brandName.com or social.service.gov then you know it's official.

[msbellows@c.im]

@taylorlorenz I compare Mastodon to email: no one can force you to watch ads before reading your email. No one can buy emails.com and make it so everyone only gets Nazi emails. Why? Because email is just a protocol. No one owns email, and there are thousands and thousands of servers.

Mastodon is like email for social media.

[alan@mindly.social]

@taylorlorenz Just one sentence: It's immune to the influence of billionaires, and resistant to the influence of politicians and state actors.

Subsequent sentences can enumerate the faults of a centralized approach, many of which are now painfully evident.

[dragonfamily@theforkiverse.com]

@taylorlorenz No ads. My IG had become an insidious place just trying to sell me things and shuffle me through content. It wasn’t “social media” any more. Since coming here my screen time is down, my notifications are down, and my pick ups are down and yet I feel more connected to news, people, and myself. Funny how that works.

[wildeyedboyfromfreecloud@masto.ai]

@taylorlorenz You know how someone bought Twitter and it turned to overnight? That can't happen. I don't get ads every 5th post. Everything else is gravy after that.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@utopiarte

How do you know that? Seems like her loss if true.

[scottgrimmett@mastodon.au]

@taylorlorenz If you research washing machines online, Mastodon won’t start trying to sell you one.

[hikergeek@mas.to]

@taylorlorenz

Actually one of the things that is better is that it's moderation is also decentralized. Thousands of people, users and server admins, contribute in an organic way to keep the content mostly civilized.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@utopiarte

She's a pretty popular journalist who is at least interested in this place.

Eventually if someone never seems to comment people stop paying attention to them, well at least I do.

[not2b@sfba.social]

@taylorlorenz Key item is: a platform not owned by billionaires, but by volunteers who aren't out to exploit you.

[futurebird@sauropods.win]

@diraquel @taylorlorenz

Yeah I low key hate the chronological feed. I wish I could customize it more and design my own algorithm so I didn't miss posts from people who don't post frequently, for example.

I will take it over an algorithm I can't control, however.

The big sell for me is no ads, including fake bot accounts that are just selling something or pushing something. Getting out from the bubble of influence of the worse people in the world.

[crazydutchy@tulipgardenshow.masto.host]

@Mastodon @taylorlorenz I especially prefer how my timelines are in chronological order rather than some random order based on algorithms no regular user understands. Also, Mastodon allows the use of third party apps, so I can pick one that best suits my needs as a blind user. Most of the other big tech companies no longer allow this. And their native apps or websites are not very user friendly to me.

[samvarma@fosstodon.org]

@taylorlorenz No algo pushing content; community-based content moderation vs top-down; open-source, auditable software

[ijimkoz@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz I would compare it to email. No one company owns all the email providers, but they all talk to each other.

[adarsh@ruby.social]

@taylorlorenz No ads. That’s it.

[jeffreysmith@mastdn.social]

@taylorlorenz

Your trust in posing the question to us makes the case: on the fediverse one may crowdsource knowledge without a commercially focused algorithm polluting the interaction with wasteful content.

[atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org]

@futurebird @diraquel @taylorlorenz I also like how the Fediverse forces you to see things you wouldn’t otherwise encounter because you previously didn’t have any interest in it.

That said, it would be nice to find more people with similar interests.

[kung_fu_emu@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz Think writing and books. Humans have had writing for millennia, books for centuries. But it was the printing press that democratized the written word. The pamphlet and broadside replaced the tome and codices. With the passing of the monastic requirement of manual copy, suddenly the voices recorded were not solely those at the pinnacle of power. Decentralized, in a very important way, means all of us.

[contrasocial@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz

I usually lead with the concept that the infrastructure of the fediverse is controlled by its community, not a corporation.

The critical part is understanding that the constellation of servers where all this is hosted is owned (or atleast paid for and administrated by) people and not profit-seeking corporations.

[gnomon@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz fediverse platforms are like a table at the local weekend market: anyone can set one up, dirt cheap, little to no infrastructure, small audience, supported by other folks doing the same thing. Perfect place to sell your watercolours or canvas for support for adding speedbumps on that residential road that Uber has been directing drivers to take at 60km/h.

It's not Wal-Mart, it never will be, it doesn't want to be. It's different, and for a bunch of folks it's a lot better.