"the company looked at the history of social media over the past decade and didn’t like what it saw… existing companies that are only model motivated by profit and just insane user growth, and are willing to tolerate and amplify really toxic content because it looks like engagement… "
It’s always amusing when someone say fediverse is good for the users, when fediverse gives zero right to the users. Pretty much every service in it is made with giving 100% of control to the admin. Admin can suspend and take down anything and any account without notice or explanation and user has no way of asking for an appeal. I mean yes. Fediverse is nice. I even run my own mastodon and Pixelfed instances. But please, let’s not fool ourselves. About Mozilla, they’re just being what they’ve been in recent years. Hypocrites. The company that claims to care about privacy, but implement privacy invasive settings and services (pocket) by default. And now they just want to create a platform focused on censorship. Thats why they’re interested in fediverse.
Shifting the power from a CEO to an instance admin is a massive improvement.
One has autocratic control over the entire site, potentially hundreds of millions of users, investors breathing down their neck, server infrastructure, and other systemic pressures; meanwhile, a fediverse instance admin has autocratic control over nothing but their own instance, a few thousand users at most, with the only money and hardware involved being their own.
The fediverse is incredibly more horizontal and decentralized than any corporate social media, the improvement is massive. And i’m a believer that vertical structures and concentrations of power are at the root of a lot of problems in society, so this is gravy to me.
But yes, it’s worth remembering that it’s not completely decentralized, and admins still have absolute power over their instance. My Mastodon instance admin doesn’t want us to use the name GIMP to refer to the open source image manipulator; they say “gimp” is a slur aimed at disabled people, which i’ve never heard before in my life.
You can pick your own instance and switch later. It thus allows you to choose an admin/moderation team, something that’s impossible with traditional social media.
Not to mention you can self host and be your own admin.
Forum moderator? Mastodon admin? Same thing really.
Basic telemetry that users can easily opt out of after install is privacy-invasive to you?
Difference is that YOU CAN BE THE ADMIN whenever you want while still being able to talk to others. Over.