I am extremely fond of Mastodon. I want to hang out here for a good long time. But I'm seeing a lot of my friends quietly detach from this place because there's so much "here are the etiquette rules for this tea shop, I can't believe you didn't lift your pinky" going around that, well, who has the energy for that these days?

I cope by just ignoring most of that, but then, I've got no following or public career to worry about.

...ah. And apparently if an instance gets completely blocked, even briefly, it severs the follow relationships between any users across the block.

Which explains why some people I thought I was already following (and vice versa) recently followed me, and showed as not being followed by me.

Well that's not great.