CIRCLE WITH A DOT

@faithisleaping @erin @JessTheUnstill don't forget to talk about taxes too

@faithisleaping @erin @JessTheUnstill

= officially an adult
= probably a teenager

@taylorlorenz

The result is a social media experience that feels a lot more like the old Internet - people talking to people, rather than ads and brands getting in the way. The way decentralised social media works can feel unfamiliar at first - for example, which server do you pick out of the hundreds online? - but it is also key to its resilience and to maintaining its quality.

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@taylorlorenz

In https://theweeklymiscellaneous.co.uk/posts/2025/10/an-autistic-persons-guide-to-mastodon/ I end up describing it as:

Mastodon distributes power. No one admin has control over the whole network, and while an admin temper-tantrum can disrupt the network, it cannot engulf it in the way that it can engulf Twitter or Bluesky. Instead, it is entirely possible to avoid the tantruming admin while still being on Mastodon.

This changes the incentives involved. Mastodon is easier to run out of a furry’s basement, so there is no incentive to raise huge amounts of venture capital money (and be beholden to what venture capitalists want). If anyone wants to enshittify their Mastodon server, users will pack up and move servers - this makes Mastodon incredibly resistant to enshittification. Since advertising is a form of enshittification, this means Mastodon is entirely ad-free - and by extension, it is surveillance-capitalism-free, because why do all that spying if you can’t have ads?

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