That's sounds great until the enormous art instance everyone goes to because "it's the art instance" defederates yours over made up and exaggerated reasons despite your instance's admins working hard to solve the few actual problems and being kind and communicative at every step.[0]

Petty tyrants try to ruin everything.

On Bluesky, there are art feeds for every kind of interest. I've used Mastodon since near the beginning and really only stick around for the small cohort of instances mine is in. It's increasingly all crossposts from Bluesky.

>> "If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph."

It took a while but I'm convinced they're sincerely working toward account portability. I can at least already point my domain at another PDS even if getting at my posts would be a sketchy, probably very technical operation with command lines and scripts. (For now)

These are people who've been working on decentralized social media for as long as it's been a thing (and newer people who share the goal), and it's hard to ignore the dedication to that goal once you look into their histories.

[0] https://info.tech.lgbt/2023/10/13/thebadspace-situation.html

> That seems like a positive, not a negative. If you don't like the choices of the people running Twitter or BlueSky, you can't leave but still maintain your social graph.

I (actually not my personal but a project account) had to move servers because the original server had been blocked by other admins because of a fairly interminable dispute about whether one user had been racist (it was far from clear cut from what I could tell from the brief time I spent digging into it).

How is this positive? It seemed to spell out a future where Mastodon split into islands based on long-forgotten generational disputes.

I want one network with a clean way to choose who I see and who interacts with me. I don't want other people making this decisions on my behalf.

> I suspect that's why Twitter is still doing as well as it is participation-wise since the Musk acquisition

Twitter and mainstream social media is still doing well because they have a large network of people that are either non-technical and can't use the fediverse or just can't be bothered.

The Musk acquisition is a storm in a teacup, for the vast majority of people (especially outside the tech circles) nothing changed. Yes it's still a cesspool, there's spam, Nazis and harassment, but that's not a significant difference from what it was before (every high profile tweet was immediately replied to by crypto scam bots even pre-Musk), and the format of the platform has always encouraged polarization, hostility and harassment, so Musk didn't change much there either. Yes it's a cesspool, but it's the same one that people know and (seemingly) love.