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

[Guest]

@taylorlorenz
Social media with:
No ads
No algorithm
No oligarchs

[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.

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@taylorlorenz there's less censorship because content policies and their enforcement are made by your peers, not by corporations whose primary goal is profit and who are strongly incentivized to silence dissent of all kinds

[ireneista@adhd.irenes.space]

@taylorlorenz every marginalized group has its own social norms which do not fully agree with anyone else's. corporate venues force everyone to be homogenous, so nobody gets to express themselves, which can become a serious problem when the topics being discussed pertain to major injustices.

[mahadevank@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz i have a take with respect to police work and surveillance. With decentralized networks, digital surveillance becomes unnecessary and criminal circles can be tracked in the traditional way, by infiltrating their Mastodon servers.

Finding criminal networks in a large centralized network requires scanning every single message and networks s can't be found so easily because the volume of random interactions and noise.

[lottajg@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz if nothing else its a blissful respite from the corporate and advertising hellscape that predominates the majority of the internet.

[amblergee@indieweb.social]

@taylorlorenz no black box algorithm predicting / influencing / controlling the information I see !

[catriona@tech.lgbt]

@taylorlorenz Local moderation is engaged moderation. On Twitter (even pre-Musk) and other centralised platforms, moderation is impossible (or at least not cost-effective) to scale, so you get arbitrary decisions and systems that are very easy to abuse.

I got suspended from Twitter more than once for "hate speech" when in fact I was objecting to hate speech, while none of my reports for hate speech ever went anywhere. Here, not only can I much more easily find an instance with moderators I trust, but if they lost my trust I would simply move to a different instance.

[rimu@mastodon.nzoss.nz]

@taylorlorenz Because billionaires are sociopaths and cannot be trusted.

Keep it simple.

[dannotdaniel@hellions.cloud]

@taylorlorenz I really struggled to boil this down in a quote toot but I'll try for a simpler answer here: it's ELON proof

^{and custom emojis}

[healyn@normal.style]

@taylorlorenz it feels smaller, in a good way. Less performative, easier to choose the people with whom you interact. Larger platforms naturally become hierarchical, this place is more of a community as long as you're not trying to speak *at* people (my experience, anyway)

[ramshackle@rwn.lol]

@taylorlorenz@mastodon.social cannot be bought by musk, Ellison or any other oligarchs

[pttp@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz It's like the FOSS (Free & Open Source Software) of social media.
Put in Audre Lorde's terms, it's not--like all the "mainstream" platforms are--"the master's tools."

[mattedgar@social.coop]

@taylorlorenz "It's a lot of fun, I make a regular donation to my instance host, and nobody's algorithm messes with my timeline"

[finestructure@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz Imagine your social media posts are little articles in a newspaper. The newspaper decides what articles to promote and makes money off the ads around them. A person like Musk or Bezos can buy the newspaper and shape it to their liking.

Or imagine everyone had their own printing press and can publish their own papers, without any ad-based promotion. You’re free to move anywhere with your printing press and your subscribers are yours, and you can reach them wherever you set it up.

[pixelpusher220@dmv.community]

@taylorlorenz

It's also good to explain the reverse.

Would you accept it if Gmail couldn't email Yahoo or Hotmail and you had to have separate accounts for every place you have friends?

That's what FB / Twitter / Reddit / YT are. Things that can't talk to each other. If you have a friend on YT, you can't follow them from your FB account.

Fedi allows *all* of them to talk to each other.

[irinarokosz@mastodon.social]

@taylorlorenz Dave Eggers answers those questions in his book, The Circle.

[schmaker@schmaker.eu]

@taylorlorenz "Imagine accessing instagram from your already existing Xitter account. YouTube from Facebook. TikTok from Reddit. Imagine your content not being accidentally moderated by AI while hatespeech remains all around. Imagine your timeline feed not trying to manipulate you to buy something or interact. This is Fediverse!"

[vinay@veganism.social]

@taylorlorenz It's a bunch of communities of users that decide how to govern/moderate themselves, with no billionaire owner nor algorithmic manipulation.

By default, communities can talk and share with other communities, but if a community starts producing unsavoury or illegal content, like Xitter's CSAM image generation, a community can decide to cut off contact with the problematic community.