Simply put, think more like celphones and e-mail, and less like facebook. You can register an e-mail with google, yahoo, your ISP, your school, your job, or all of the above at the same time, and no matter which one you are using, you can still send a message to your mother for some god forsaken reason is still using an AOL e-mail address. If your e-mail provider is a jerk, throws too many ads, tracks you too much or simply hasn't added the features you want. you can just switch providers, and YOU can switch providers alone... and still e-mail all your old friends without having to beg them to change as well.
I like it!
Social networks made and run by the community volunteers, instead of corporations, a safe haven to have a chat. That's the main selling point, IMO.
Another point would be that instead of a single authority (e.g. Facebook), there are many communities spread across different websites, you can easily host your own social network instance, connect it with the existing ones, have your own rules, etc.
I typically bring up email. I can have Gmail, you can have Yahoo mail, and Jimmy can have his home made email server and we can all email each other.
website? do I have to install anything if I were to host such instance? or is everything automated?
https://fedi.tips/what-is-mastodon-what-is-the-fediverse/
This website is a good starting point imo
Three groups of people sitting on three tables. While they have their own people and can use their own themes and topics, they can look at and communicate with the other tables people and their topics too.
