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
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@aj Someone shared some media with me about "poisoning the algorithm" by not clicking on ragebait for days or weeks until the systems stop supplying it and shift to healthier fare and I just had to laugh, because the description of the goal was a description of the corner of the fediverse that I'm exposed to.
People are out there spending days "poisoning the algorithm" just go get what we get on Mastodon on day 1!
@aj I like this:
"a place to have conversations online without algorithms, AI, and ads getting in the way."
Can I use it as a tagline on piefed.social?