Perhaps not so much "wholesome" - because I can definitely provide a handful of historical and current examples that definitely aren't - but certainly more "community minded".

In that regard, your experiences match mine. I've been in the online community space since the Compuserv, GEnie and Prodigy days. Those platforms were more or less self-limiting - you needed to have access to a computer with a modem in the early to mid 1980s - but it was still a bit of a mess for trying to make any real, lasting online connections.

When I discovered my local BBS community, it was a massive game changer in terms of the quality of connections and conversations I had. It even inspired me to run my own BBS for a while.

I don;t like Bluesky's approach to decentralization because their system requires a TON of resources to run an independent instance. ActivityPub - upon which Mastodon and others is based - is mature, flexible, and allows for true decentralization. I can self host my own instance, or I can host an instance for one or more of my communities. I actually host my own Mastodon instance just for myself, and it;s remarkably easy. I imagine adding accounts would not increase my effort at all.

The right approach to decentralization is for those who can host instances to do so for themselves and for those in the communities that matter to them. That way, those who can't self host should still be able to find an instance they can trust. Then, those instances should be allowed to communicate with one another - only blocking instances if they go rogue and affect performance, but letting individuals have fine grained control over the messages they receive and the individuals with whom they interact.

This creates a world of alternatives for anyone seeking connection. Mastodon already works this way - you have art-focused instances, infosec focused instances, erotic content focused instances, etc. I can follow folks from any of those instances on my own account and engage directly with them. I'm seeing more folks start up PeerTube instances - which also use ActivityPub - as alternatives to YouTube. I can follow everything from my self-hosted Mastodon account. It's awesome.

I eventually plan to launch my own ActivityPub implementation so I can host others in my communities and provide a workable alternative to the centralized social media companies - e.g. I'd like my kid's school PTA to stop using Facebook Groups.

I feel like that's more the "small" effect. Humans are generally more community-minded in small groups than in big ones because we were built for groups where everyone recognizes everyone else. So big groups where nobody recognizes anyone else can be a problem.

(From this perspective, it matters much less whether someone is self-hosting the servers or not if the group is small, those two things just happen to coincide.)