My Comment:
I got on the fediverse and ultimately deleted my Twitter account. I get a lot more engagement and followers on Mastodon than I ever got on Twitter. If you’re famous or well known, you have dilemmas like this, but for those of us with less mass appeal and a higher nerd factor, the choice was simple. There is racism in any platform, but at least in the fediverse, you can shut it down yourself instead of having to depend on moderators and beg someone else to take you seriously. The risk of defederation or just having a bad reputation for harboring too much hate keeps folks in line when the individual user can block an entire domain. Edit: I also want to make sure people know that Mastodon is not the entire Fediverse. It’s only one open source software project among many, that allows for communication through the ActivityPub protocol. Having a Mastodon or CalcKey or Pixelfed or another account or server on the Fediverse is like basically having your own website, and indeed, through ActivityPub, you can connect your site to the Fediverse. It can’t really be compared to another platform because it’s not really a platform. It’s a protocol. So there’s no gatekeeper for the same reason there’s no gatekeeper deciding what kind of website you can start. It’s really decentralized so the individual user has a lot of control, especially if you start your own instance. You can do that for less than a blue checkmark.
