Because I could
I keep thinking about a couple #Twitter threads criticizing #Mastodon (the #Fediverse, really) for being inherently different than closed commercial platforms using far-fetched hypotheticals and extraordinary occurrences; while I do not want to make a useless point-by-point response, instead I'll tell you what I like about federated social media and #Friendica in particular.
After #Facebook froze my account for using a pseudonym (a spottily enforced rule), I started hosting my own #Diaspora pod because I could.
I didn't know anyone so I initially made contacts with other podmins and progressively extended my circle through shared posts. This is how I learned about #Friendica, a platform that was compatible with both #Diaspora and #OStatus (#GNUSocial, #StatusNet ) because it could.
Written in #PHP, liked both the multi-protocol approach and that I could contribute code to it. So I started hosting my #Friendica node and I kept following the same Diaspora accounts, because I could.
When #Mastodon was first released based on OStatus, I started following several accounts on there because I could. When #ActivityPub was released and supported by Mastodon, we followed suite a few months later, because we could.
With popularity came the right-wing trolls and free speech extremists who organized their own federated instances, but they never bothered me much as I blocked their entire instance domains because I could.
None of these are currently possible with commercial platforms. Not all people will end up hosting their own node and it's fine, but the breadth of possibility is what makes federated social network attractive.
