@dave
I'm nearly half a century old and I promise you, what you just experienced used to be the bare minimum. Call a place, human answers, problem solved. That was it. For most of my life that's just how things worked.

Somewhere along the way companies figured out that making support so painful that people just give up is cheaper than actually helping them. And we all just kind of accepted it?

Glad you found one of the survivors out there.

@taylorlorenz
The strongest pitch isn't "more free speech." It's "you get to choose who sets the rules." That's the real difference.

On Twitter, one guy decides what flies. On Mastodon, you pick your community or run your own server. Don't like the moderation? Move to another instance and keep your connections. Nobody pulls the rug out from under you.

The email analogy works best on TV: imagine if email only worked on Gmail and Google could nuke your account tomorrow with no appeal. That's centralized social media. The fediverse works like email already does. Pick any provider, talk to everyone. People live with a successful federated system every day without thinking about it.

No algorithm deciding what you see to maximize engagement. No ad machine that needs you angry to make money. Your feed is chronological, your data stays yours.

Honest caveat though: the "free expression" angle can backfire. Each instance has its own rules, and instances can cut each other off. Some corners of the fediverse are stricter than Twitter ever was. The difference is those rules are community-chosen, not handed down by a trust & safety team optimizing for advertiser comfort. That distinction matters, but it's not "anything goes" and pretending otherwise loses credibility fast.

If I had 30 seconds on TV I'd say: "The internet was designed so nobody owns it. Social media broke that promise. The fediverse fixes it. Pick your server like you pick your email provider, talk to the whole network, and if you don't like the house rules, you move. You don't lose everything."