If I was to nominate the two things I find most striking about Mastodon they'd be:
1. the ability to edit posts after posting; this (as my followers will know) is a facility that I use a lot (and thanks to my great crew of typo spotters);
2. the norm of civility that we all maintain; of course trolling & slamming is not completely absent, but at least in my timeline & discussions/conversations civility have been the over-riding characteristic of my exchanges.
@ChrisMayLA6 I’ve seen it noted that the civility follows the “social contract” formulation of tolerance.
E.g. people join, feel “safe” enough to start making transphobic comments, refuse to listen to polite responses and requests to please not, and then get chased out of the fediverse screaming “so much for the tolerant left!”.
I feel this is not an ideal solution, but I’m not sure how else it could go while still maintaining said social contract.
Of course, they are always welcome to create their own shard of the fediverse. That’s the whole point of the fediverse.
Indeed, when I've mentioned civility here before there have been comments that this might also be peculiar to my constellation of followers & discussions, but not seeing beyond my own interactions I'm unable to judge other than from my own direct experience
@ChrisMayLA6 I mean, I’ve personally had to block a couple of people who were just being awful. But by and large I consider the “constellation” thing to be a feature rather than a bug.
I’ve watched one person be hounded of because they insisted on making transphobic comments from their own personal instance while claiming it was “civil debate”. Again, not ideal but also not entirely sure that’s a bug - if they want to be bigoted they can create their own shard of the fediverse.
My own belief is that a lot of issues with people being uncivil comes from attempting to force a social network that puts us in contact with much greater than the ~150 people our brains are designed to deal with.
Also, what counts as “civil” in some spheres is very different to elsewhere - on a giant, flat social network people have “mates” discussions on the same forum as public debate, and it’s not always clear where the boundary lies.
Yes, that point on what counts as civil is key I think as @jwi pointed out there may also be a demographic element at play - my network may be skewed towards the civil?
@ChrisMayLA6 @jwi there’s a few ways I could interpret “demographic element”, so I may respond wrong here, but I think I’m essentially agreeing.
But I’m also saying that that clustered network is a feature rather than a bug, and people trained by big networks to think of them all as one place may be misinterpreting that.
Or in other words, people on the internet are always going to be awful. But the clustering on the fediverse gives a greater opportunity to create non awful sub-networks.
Yes, I think we *are* on the same page
Emeritus Prof Christopher May
Faye
Alex P Roe 
Petra van Cronenburg