@Swagpuss McG You may not have noticed it yet because all you've ever seen so far of the Fediverse is Mastodon, but Mastodon doesn't give you an untouched "pure feed."

It leaves Mastodon toots untouched, yes.

But everything that comes from outside vanilla Mastodon is changed, if not to say mangled.

Posts from Pleroma, from Akkoma, from MissKey, from CalcKey, from FoundKey, from Socialhome, from GoToSocial, from Friendica, from Hubzilla, from (streams), even from Mastodon forks have any and all of their text formatting stripped away. You won't even be able to tell quotes because they aren't shown as such, because Mastodon removes the necessary formatting.

Also, pictures. Other projects can embed pictures within a post, and they can show more than four pictures. Mastodon rips the pictures out of the posts, converts the last four into file attachments, shows them after the post instead of within the post where they belong, and all but the last four pictures are discarded, thrown away, never to be seen by any Mastodon user.

If this isn't abstraction, I don't know what is.

That's why I've told you to try Akkoma and/or Friendica. It will open your eyes and show you what the Fediverse really looks like, and what can be done in the Fediverse, all once you're free from the restrictions and limitations of Mastodon. It'll be at least as much a revelation as when you learned that the Fediverse is, in fact, not only Mastodon.