@eloquence I am a bit torn and am curious how you see it. Part of the quality of Mastodon is that it's private people interacting here. I think much of the value but also much of the problems on other platforms stemmed from blending the private, professional, and the platform's business approach. Would leaving out the latter be enough?
Also: Is Mastodon a good platform for business, considering the lack of analytics?
I think the key for successful involvement here is being less performative than on Twitter. Mastodon is a bit more conversational, which requires a human at the wheel who's willing to step outside of some highly confined role.
There are quite a few major orgs who seem to be making this work already. @ProPublica comes to mind as exemplary.
The point re: vulnerability to AIs is interesting. I would contrast it a bit with Wikipedia, which is also very open and generally has figured out good ways to deal with bots/automated content.
I think like WIkipedia, Mastodon can leverage community moderation as a strength -- and defederation of poorly moderated instances as a defense mechanism.
It's not Twitter-scale yet, but it _has_ scaled to millions of users without being overrun by spam or AI-generated misinformation.
Erik Moeller
Ben