@capn_pancakes right right. Like, the most pressing example being, maybe mastodon.social wants to stay...social...but because most people are in a political fervor, basically everyone is ALSO on mastodon.politics or what-have-you. But it mentally segregates your modes of interaction. In real time. Like, you can carry on a POLITE conversation with strangers and simultaneously be like "fuck Trump he's golfing again" and make it unlisted via mastodon.politics
@danharmon @capn_pancakes it is nice that the compartmentalization is so deliberate. I dunno though, right now different instances seem to be more oriented towards and partially bounded by communities, in the sense that most stick primarily to their home instance rather than existing across several instances and poking around in the ones most relevant to their identity/interest of the moment. So moving between mastodon instances is not quite as fluid as subreddits or Discords.