Following up from discussion with @LydiaConwell ; I'm seeing a lot of journalists conflate fedi with mastodon.social-- essentially, a single website with a single point of failure-- and missing the point of distribution.
Is there a good article, infographic, or blog post debunking this, accessible to people without any technical background? (So nothing like "ActivityPub is a protocol", since most people don't know what communications protocols are.)
I found the comparisons to email to work best so far to explain Mastodon. The problem is it's usually followed by 'And? I'm not going to run my own server, that's beyond me. What is the difference between individual instances? How do I know which one to join? Should I maintain multiple identities across different instances?'
I usually don't have simple, sound bitey answers that appeal to non-techies.
@MatejLach @cidney Actually choosing an instance is quite overwhelming and because many of them are defensive when they set out their rules (to put trolls off) they come across a little bit authoritarian and stifling. But once you're here it's easy enough.
It's much more social and much more diverse than other site, I feel.
@LydiaConwell @MatejLach ...agreed.
I'm having trouble thinking of a good instance for journalists who already have a real-name following and don't want to self-host. Same for any celebrities that aren't tech-adjacent.
@hansup I think that would be brilliant. In many ways Mastodon is a great avenue to explore.
@cidney @LydiaConwell @MatejLach Maybe journalists and celebrities should just create their own instances? Compared to most people on the fediverse, they have plenty of ressources and network to do so.