@anildash I’m not sure I love the Xanga/LiveJournal analogy.
It’s more like AOL and CompuServe were to the open web as Twitter and Bluesky are to ActivityPub.
I don’t see Mastodon as “the choice for nerds” any more than the open web had a specific audience.
The promise of Mastodon and ActivityPub is that these different audiences and communities will be able to interact on the same terms.