I appreciate the author taking a swing at this topic. She suggests these values:

fostering genuine connection
protecting privacy and enforcing consent
championing accessibility

I think she’s obviously right about the first value but the others are less clear. There’s certainly groups on Mastodon who are keen on privacy, consent and accessibility but if you look at the features of the apps and how they’re constructed I don’t feel like those are really core values. ActivityPub is a privacy nightmare and most apps have between ghastly to ok accessibility.

It’s hard to pick out values that we all share because of the inherently chaotic nature of it. Perhaps that’s a value tho - diversity.

There’s a pretty strong anti-capitalist theme that comes up a lot. At it’s best, this is a “people before economy” value, a pro-democracy, a pro-life (in the literal sense), pro-freedom value. No billionaire can buy the fediverse and shape it in their singular vision.

The federated nature of things means people can find their own instance to call home, one that suits them and their kin without losing access to all the goodies of the wider network. Is this a value? What is the word for it? Self-actualization?