No, nothing about furries is "normal". Get over it.

Nobody important or relevant enough is moving to Mastodon.

I used to see a lot of furry accounts in the Discover feed, but I mute them when I see them, and now I rarely see them any more. I don't have anything against furries, but it's not content I'm interested in. This is more a comment that Bluesky does seem to have an algorithm (at least in the Discover feed) that is sensitive to what you do or don't show interest in. Or it could just be that a lot more people have joined recently, so the furry stuff just isn't as prevalent.

Bluesky is trying to differentiate itself with moderation tools -- people have created lists of furry accounts so you can bulk-ignore. But yeah I haven't found my "people" there yet, most of the activity is people I wouldn't choose to interact with.

This was my experience trying to find and instance to join. And as a result I didn't join any.

I'm pretty sure most "normal" people would react in a similar fashion, which kind of makes this a notable catch-22 for wider Mastadon-adaption.

The tough thing is that for the vast majority of end users, the interface that they see is the software or service. So if their instance has a bunch of disgusting pornography, as far as they’re concerned, mastodon has a bunch of disgusting pornography. For a lot of folks, the browser/server abstraction for regular websites and how that differs from native apps is about as far as they’re willing to go in their understanding of Internet architecture and for many, it’s too far. Requiring people understand that not all mastodon is mastodon despite it being kind of the same, in order to avoid explicit hentai, is a non-starter. My grandparents are dead, but they would probably take their computer out back and set it on fire if that shit flashed up on their screen. They sure wouldn’t have used it as an opportunity to get all of the base knowledge they needed to even realize they had to instance shop. Facebook is just riiiiight over there.