Lately I’ve noticed a growing number of #News accounts on #Mastodon, and honestly, it feels a bit overwhelming. I don’t use the #Fediverse to get breaking updates, I have other sources for that.
What draws me here are real #People, authentic #Experiences, and thoughtful #Conversations with like-minded individuals.
#Social platforms shouldn’t just mirror traditional #media, they should amplify #humanconnection. Let’s keep the focus on community, not just constant newsfeeds.
I think, we have to turn it upside down - don't tell people "it is like Twitter, but you have to choose a server", tell them:
I think one of the things that I like best about being on Fedi is the idea of starting with a small community and building my social graph here from the ground up based on essentially word-of-mouth due to how federation works. I got exposed to a bunch of new people in my local instance, got to know them, and through them was able to branch out and find more and more people to interact with.
And finding a small community - and participating in it - is a lot easier than people think (and we generally haven't done a good job explaining that to new folks as a whole). It just takes a little bit of work and maybe an application and a waiting period to get accepted into that instance.
But every other social media that I've ever used has had the opposite model - get blasted in the face with everybody shouting from everywhere and whittle it down to your "community", which is what I think most people are now trained to accept, and maybe why they don't like the fediverse paradigm.
But for my money, I prefer to build my network from the bottom up, warts and all. It feels so much more like "communicating with" than "being shouted at", if that makes sense. Maybe that's why I love my instance so much - I took the time (and risk) to find one that looked like a group of people I would vibe with. 
[witchzard] 
