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

Reinhard Lackner

@taylorlorenz
The strongest pitch isn't "more free speech." It's "you get to choose who sets the rules." That's the real difference.

On Twitter, one guy decides what flies. On Mastodon, you pick your community or run your own server. Don't like the moderation? Move to another instance and keep your connections. Nobody pulls the rug out from under you.

The email analogy works best on TV: imagine if email only worked on Gmail and Google could nuke your account tomorrow with no appeal. That's centralized social media. The fediverse works like email already does. Pick any provider, talk to everyone. People live with a successful federated system every day without thinking about it.

No algorithm deciding what you see to maximize engagement. No ad machine that needs you angry to make money. Your feed is chronological, your data stays yours.

Honest caveat though: the "free expression" angle can backfire. Each instance has its own rules, and instances can cut each other off. Some corners of the fediverse are stricter than Twitter ever was. The difference is those rules are community-chosen, not handed down by a trust & safety team optimizing for advertiser comfort. That distinction matters, but it's not "anything goes" and pretending otherwise loses credibility fast.

If I had 30 seconds on TV I'd say: "The internet was designed so nobody owns it. Social media broke that promise. The fediverse fixes it. Pick your server like you pick your email provider, talk to the whole network, and if you don't like the house rules, you move. You don't lose everything."

Jörg Seidel

@taylorlorenz
Your choice and control. Nobody is trying to manipulate you or make you buy something. You can just hang out with the others.

Waiting On A Bus

@taylorlorenz someone with a profit motive is not incentivized to hijack your brain. I engage with things on Mastodon/fediverse in a much more controlled, healthier, self-driven way than I ever did on Twitter, Instagram, etc.

clayote

@taylorlorenz They're really very cheap to run

That means it doesn't cost that much to start your own, if the available servers don't work for you

(this is not true for ATProto)

And you don't have to do it alone. Those other servers have actual people running them, who you can just talk to. It's not like trying to get the attention of a Facebook moderator. When you and another moderator follow each other, you just talk, and if you like the way they run their server, any user of either server can do the same.

+>e

@taylorlorenz well, I think that isn't about the quality of the free speech (there are tons of instanced banned from main federation networks) but the difficulty to apply censorship, of course, instance admins are individually more vulnerable by State or corporate pressure than the owner of csam dot com/x , but there are too many of them making it more resilient

Pete Prodoehl 🍕

@taylorlorenz Real quick off the top of my head I usually say the Fediverse is not controlled by Billionaires, can't be bought/sold or controlled, isn't filled with ads, doesn't track you or try to sell your information, isn't filled with Nazis (they are on their own servers and I never see them because they are blocked) and there's not an algorithm trying to feed me crap I don't want to see.

★ N O R M I E ★

@taylorlorenz
WOULD YOU RATHER:

one centralized server run by a big tech company (eg. Meta)

minimal moderation in order to get as many people connected as possible, to monetize them $$$

minorities are collateral damage, constantly attacked and cast out entirely

OR:

millions of servers, self funded or running on user donations

millions of different forms of moderation

highly moderated spaces where trans people are respected OR users are ejected

AND unmoderated spaces for awful people

and most importantly, the ability to very easily move your account between all these spaces, to start over as a nasty or nice person

brib

@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?

(1/2)

brib

@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.

(2/2)

Mike Fraser :Jets: :flag:

@taylorlorenz You own your timeline. Like the early days when social media worked.

Mastodon

@taylorlorenz let us know how we can help - we think a lot of people are pretty tired of having their data mined, conversations sold, and commercial companies injecting inauthentic content into their timelines. Maybe that’s just us? Happy to have a chat if it would be useful.

Lookie Loo

@taylorlorenz
This post right here:

Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart@mastodon.social)

It will never stop being funny to me that the whole "you can't trust Wikipedia because anyone can edit it" scare happened and now Wikipedia is the only trustworthy website because it turns out profit motive is the reason things turn to shit.

Mastodon (mastodon.social)

Because Mastodon is lots of severable, community-edited, non-profits linked up.

Jodsclass 🏴‍☠️☕

For me, it’s the total lack of an algorithm as standard, and the fact that any individual or organisation can spin up an instance, making censorship that much harder, especially if hosted in a privacy respecting country.

Lynn D 🇨🇦

@taylorlorenz no algorithm and no ads means that you get to see the posts from the people that you follow, not who The Algorithm dictates. You can also move to another instance if
without losing your followers, and if your instance is federated, you can “talk” to all of the other federated instances (that last one is something that I have had to explain to several people who have somehow been given the impression that you can only connect with people on your own instance).

Jonathan T

@taylorlorenz At the risk of quoting a monstrous human being, "Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"

TheZorse

@taylorlorenz

While it can be used for commercial purposes, the control rests with people, not corporations. In that sense it's true social media, rather than a profit-making or power-manipulating enterprise disguised as something else.

Meznor 🇨🇦🇮🇹🇪🇺

@taylorlorenz It *starts* with community (does not seek unsustainable growth, by default). Because hosts depend on the community to fund it, it can’t grow so big as to be exploited (limits to growth are useful to sustain meaningful community connections).

sodiboo :pride_heart:

@taylorlorenz@mastodon.social I think one aspect that can make it safer is the relatively small scale of each node in the network and the horizontal scaling of moderation. like, if there's something abhorrent that breaks my server's rules and I report it, then I know who will receive that report. I can talk to my instance moderators. and they're not moderating the entire network; just what reaches their instance. they need to do a lot less work to still deal with a significant chunk of abuse, compared to a monolithic social media platform.

additionally, I can choose which instance I trust to manage that responsibility and what rules I agree with. there's no single unilateral team deciding what you can and can't post on the fediverse; if I disagree with my instance moderation I can talk to them yes, but I can also go somewhere else without having to find an entirely new platform with new faces. my new instance would let me access the same underlying network but a slightly different view of it with a slightly different vibe.

not everyone will get along perfectly. a lot of people will want slightly different rules enforced on their social media platforms. decentralized moderation makes that possible.

personally, I host my own instance. this does mean that I've received more abuse than I ever did when someone else was moderating my exposure to trolls. but I've only really blocked about a dozen domains and after that it's fine? and now, I'm left with a place that is my own. this is the ultimate tool of free expression. nobody can tell me what I can or can't post (besides my hosting provider). this is just a thing you can do on fedi. become ungovernable. this isn't like "One Weird Trick To Have No Accountability": if I post anhorrent things or behave badly, I will get blocked on a large scale by many instances; but as long as I'm chill , I still get to use the same social network with the added bonus that nobody can take my account away from me without warning. it's mine.

softproof

@taylorlorenz By proving to them that crowdsourcing can still beat AI-fluff, perhaps? And you're well on your way

Paul

@taylorlorenz

No ads, no algorithm, admins who care (if you pick the right instance), a sense of community and control. You have it here, rather than the billionaires

Wandering Adventure Party

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

Al Sweigart (@AlSweigart@mastodon.social)