@_elena
Mostly agreed, but I’d be wary of the ‘non-commercial’ framing, for a couple of reasons:

First, it immediately raises the question of ‘what is it if it isn’t commercial?’ And ‘where does the money come from?’ These are both important conversations to have later. They aren’t the first conversations you want. The thing you probably do want is some framing (as you said) about it not being an advertising / data-mining platform. I think getting the media to refer to data-mining platforms as ‘social media’ is one of most impressive piece of marketing of the last couple of decades, there’s a lot of work needed to undo that.

Second, the Fediverse (sorry!) isn’t intrinsically non-commercial. A few news organisations run their own instances, for example. These exist as a commercial channel for them. If they provided a mechanism to pay to follow some of their accounts, that would be completely fine! If a company wants to create its own instance to better engage with its customers, that’s wonderful but also 100% commercial.

I think the messaging needs to focus a lot more on agency: you are in control of what you see. But for that to be a strong message, there need to be better discovery mechanisms. It was easy for me to find people here interested in (at least some of) the same things as me, but my partner wanted to find content about music, linguistics, education, and assessment, and gave up. I occasionally see posts that are relevant to these interests but I have no idea how to find them. The tradeoff for the data-mining platforms is that you see a bunch of things you want to see, in exchange for seeing things other people pay for you to see. The Fediverse needs to capture the advantage part of that without the down side. I’d love to see an onboarding flow that gave you a big list of things you might be interested in and made you follow the hashtags, as long as much more overt ‘you are seeing this because you follow this hashtag / person’ above every message so people understand how they are in control.