actually the thing about mastodon that keeps hitting me is that it's a return to the governance model of the internet of the 90s, which is the "local dictator", with a single admin or a small mod team who are the sole owners and operators of a site. and like, oh right, anybody who's only used, say, twitter and facebook and youtube and tumblr and myspace and so forth and so on would have had absolutely no exposure to, because all major social media platforms online for the past ten years or so have been huge corporate monoliths (or wannabe huge corporate monoliths). getting mad at brad on livejournal was a very different thing than getting mad at jack on twitter or david karp on tumblr, because lj was brad's site in a way that was very different from jack being CEO of twitter
@xax I've used message boards as a point of comparison for friends who remember the fandom days of the '00s. It's a Twitter format, and there's cross-talk (like if, say, Allspark.com and TFW2005 had a cross-talk feature), but it's that same kind of local dictatorship.