Recently, there was a question by 
@taylorlorenz about how you explain the Fediverse to someone who doesn't use it.
And usually, what we tend to do is we talk about servers and decentralisation and federation and ActivityPub and all these highly technical concepts.
I've been thinking about it, and all that technical stuff is really impressive work by people far more clever than I'll ever be.
But for me, that technology is a facilitating thing. It's like trying to describe how a bicycle works, rather than why you ride it.
Instead, what the Fediverse is, is a place to have conversations online without algorithms, AI, and ads getting in the way.
Which is increasingly a rare thing online.
Almost the entirety of the internet, from SEO on the web to YouTube to TikTok to Spotify to Instagram and X and Facebook, has been turned into a race to game an algorithm designed to sell ads.
What makes the Fedi unique is that it's not that.
And I suspect if you're trying to persuade someone to try Mastodon (or Lemmy, or Pixelfed, or GtS, etc), you'll get a lot further explaining it as algorithm-free, ad-free, AI-free conversations, rather than trying to describe a decentralised protocol.
#Fediverse #Mastodon #ActivityPub
@ajAJ Sadauskas I'm less sure that would work on its own. All of the corporate enshittified networks they already use started out that way too.
To make those points I think you have to focus on the community side. Shit like 
@FediPact
#FediPact -- I've got the stats somewhere but off the top of my head I think it was something like 30% of servers had Meta blocked before they'd really even *tried* to join, just from the announcement that they might. The fact that, unlike corporate networks where they do what they want and users whine about it until they get bored, around here it feels like debating the future of the network *actually shapes it*. Everything is built by consensus, not cash. By donations and volunteers and passion. Any VC startup can be slop free for a few years but that stuff is what *keeps* Fedi slop free.
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