CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@taylorlorenz

What is Mastodon?

Mastodon is a miniature version of Twitter that anyone can host for themselves. You can host a copy for your friends, or a group of people get together and host a copy for their city or interest group or community.

What's special about Mastodon is that each of these miniature Twitters can talk to each other. So you can talk to people in other places from anywhere.

Benefits

When you sign up for an account, you are now a member of that community. You are not a User being fed an algorithm, you are a Member who gets to decide what you read and who you connect with.

Freedom

Because this is just software being run on your behalf, you are not beholden to the whims of some giant corporation. You and your community members are free to make your own community rules, to decide who you talk to. If you, personally, don't like some rule change, you can move to another community, or even start your own. You control big decisions. //

@taylorlorenz

I tried to answer your two core questions, "benefits" and "freedom", but really struggled to answer the questions as you posed them. I think the reason I got caught up on those answers is your use of the word "Platform". And when the general public think of "Platform", they immediately begin thinking of all those monolithic platforms out there.

Calling it "decentralized" doesn't really help. It's not a particularly precise term, nor do most people really understand the technical and social trade-offs that it implies. And "most people" includes a lot of people on Mastodon itself.

And we regularly see people who are disappointed when they get here, because they are expecting Twitter and they are getting something significantly different.

I think I can answer your two questions, next toot, but I think they need to be framed correctly first... /1