Mastodon has been better than I expected after the first Twitter exodus slowed down. Much less noise than X/Twitter. The protocol may turn out not to be scalable, but it's very much alive.

▲

observationist 12 hours ago | parent [-]

It's like a compromise between forums and twitter, and there are some great smaller communities out there. When the curation and moderation are good, and the community has a solid purpose, you get gems - quite a few mastodon gems out there.

▲

akho 12 hours ago | parent [-]

At this point, it isn't clear why federation is in there at all. The "forums, bit twitter" concept does produce nice places, but federation seems like a net negative for that.

	▲	riffraff 11 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Federation is good if you want to stay within a community but also have a chance to interact with others. I.e. you mostly care about technology foo but occasion delve into epic poetry, and it's nice to interact with both footech.social and epicpoems.read. Also, being able to consume personal publishing (blogs!) from within the same app is quite nice.
	▲	owisd 12 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		The steelman for federation is that email survived the rise of the big platforms despite no-one owning email, so making other applications follow the email model means they too could be free from central ownership.
	▲	incompatible 6 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		You'd have to have a lot of trust that the one instance wouldn't get enshittified and end up as another X / Truth Social / BlueSky. Different instances can also have different rules, different moderation and different federation. Edit: and exist in different legal jurisdictions, and also be harder to ban or regulate.