There are some tight groups, but number of active users is very low and getting lower, number of serves is also decreasing.

I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.

The most popular servers like mastodon.social are cesspools of snark, anger and grandstanding. Oh, and the moderation is random/nonexistent depending on the day.

Here is the thing. None of that matters to me. The only thing that matters is the people I follow.

I don't really care for inactive users, I do post, and people reply to me, and i follow a bunch of people that post. I follow a bunch of hashtags so discover posts outside of my immediate circle. No ads, almost no trolls, no bots, haven't seen spam in a while, it's a great experience as a daily user.

The way you paint it feels akin to the people going back rural or even to the middle of the forest, but in the digital scape which has the possibility of being seen just following a (sometimes quite esoteric) URI.

The beauty of OG Twitter was that talking to void is all that was needed. People pumped in tons of interesting contents and it worked(I'd argue it still does work, for lots of IT relevant topics).

The "problem" is that the European WWW didn't like the content that works(and I'd argue same applies to Twitter of now). If you don't like the content that works, you get little to no real content or users.

I walked away a long time ago when I realized how fragmented and prone to drama it was.

sounds exactly like blogging 20 years ago

> I did some random sampling and it looks like large number of active users are talking to void and may not have realized it. They post regularly, have 100s of followers but no active followers.

This is true on Twitter/X or any social network like it.