'._('How federation works (practice)').'
'._('On commercial and centralized social networks everything is done while staying within them, never leaving the gates of the platform.').'
'.sprintf(_('On Mastodon and the other Fediverse platforms things work differently: your own and your Instance’s federated network grow with the reblog mechanism (for example, when you follow an account that reblogs some posts from another account that you’ve never seen before, and you decide to follow the latter too, and so on), that doesn’t require you to leave your Instance, but they can grow by many other means: anyone can discover new and interesting Instances, accounts and posts by checking dedicated online resources (like our Instances search engine and those you can find on our Links page), or by browsing the web outside Mastodon, reading blogs and magazines and having real-life interactions. Just as in real life, those who explore allow boundaries to be expanded faster!'),$dlang,$dlang).'
@@ -417,6 +435,19 @@ echo('
'._('That’s it! Now you can open the PeerTube account profile you just followed on your Mastodon Instance website, or on the PeerTube Instance website, or simply close this browser tab.').'
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+'._('Mastodon is by far the most widely used platform in the Fediverse (fedidb.org reports today, November 3, 2023, almost 12,000 active servers, while the second most used platform, Misskey, only has approximately 1,200), and it shares with the other Fediverse platforms some features that make it much better than commercial social networks: the absence of profiling tools, giving also greater privacy, and the structural unfitness for its use in advertising by large companies.').'
+'._('At the same time, however, its development team pursues in many ways a strong centralization of the Fediverse toward the already most populated Mastodon servers and in particular toward mastodon.social, the Instance it directly manages, for example by means of the design of the the official Apps’ welcome screen, which does everything possible to drive new users to sign up on mastodon.social, by presenting the most populated Instances on top of this page, with mastodon.social in the lead, and by carefully avoiding the introduction into the web frontend and the official Apps of simple features that are already present in other compatible clients, such as the ability to follow the Local Timelines of Instances other than one’s own, and to discover new Instances from one’s own account: features that would by themselves reduce, and only for those who so wish, the differences between using a small-medium sized Instance and a large one. All of this has greatly contributed to determining the current situation, in which the 1% of the most populated Mastodon Instances hosts 86% of Mastodon users, and the 10% hosts 99%, and the situation is even worse when one looks at the data regarding the active users; and this is problematic because, as we have written in our Guide since the very beginning, such large Instances are difficult to moderate, and therefore social harassment dynamics that are typical of commercial social networks easily recreate there, and because those who run them gain a lot of power over too many people, and because a more distributed network made up of many small to medium-sized Instances is much more resistant than a network with this level of centralization.').'
+'._('Moreover, the implementation of content views such as Trending Posts, Trending Hashtags, Trending News and Trending Accounts introduces and reproduces in the Fediverse the competitive and meritocratic dynamics – with merit defined in essence by the popularity of a piece of content – that are typical of commercial social, and the same cumulative tendency whereby the content and accounts that they make most visible are much more likely to become even more so than others. Besides, although these views can be deactivated (with the regrettable exception of Trending Accounts, and only in bulk) by those who administer an Instance, they are active by default, and their possible deactivation, at present, produces a disadvantage for the Instances that enact it: in the official Apps, in fact, the corresponding subsections of the “Explore” section do not get hidden and remain empty, easily giving users, particularly new ones, the impression of an inactive, isolated, or malfunctioning Instance.').'
+'._('Finally, to make the current trend of reproducing commercial social network dynamics worse, the introduction of a feature similar to X/Twitter’s “Retweet and comment”, which just a few years ago Eugen Rochko, Mastodon’s main developer, considered harmful and therefore declared he would not implement, is looming: “Quote posts” are already planned in Mastodon’s development roadmap and will inevitably be used mainly, as is already the case on X/Twitter, to create disruption, generate controversy and harass the person who wrote a post without discussing it directly with them, while recommending a post or an ongoing thread can already be done in other ways that are less prone to harassing usage.').'
+'._('We think that in a social context that is culturally and materially increasingly marked by competition, centralization, and the inability to confront each other outside of these dynamics, which are pursued and advocated by all the big economic and political players through their media overpower, those who develop FOSS social networks should avoid providing even only optional features such as Trending Post, Hashtags, News, Accounts, and the “Quote posts” to come, and to pursue in their turn, in their small context, the centralization and deterioration of social interactions for their own benefit; all the more so when they claim and pride themselves on pursuing instead cooperation, equal confrontation and decentralization.').'
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