@kissane This is really interesting! It reminds me of the Paleozoic days of the Internet, when people didn't really quite know what to do with this new "Information Superhighway" thing. The Web was mostly a curiosity (no search engines), and people congregated on Usenet. Only, there was no real guide to Usenet and where the cool hangouts were. So it was hard to find one's community, and it discouraged a lot of the closeness that people found easily on Twitter.

There were Usenet newsgroups that were very cliquey and insular too, and Kibo help you if you didn't know the local culture and unwritten rules (which, on occasion, they assembled into a FAQ so that you would know exactly how to conform and be tolerated).

I think the biggest Mastodon problem is that it's hard to even know who's out there to contact. It's like we've all got ham radios but we have no idea what frequencies anyone else is broadcasting on. Mastodon feels like a sparsely-populated province, but in reality it could be teeming with communities that I haven't stumbled onto.