@chuckwendig this doesn’t counter the rest of your arguments, but @phildini wrote a blog post a few months ago talking about having made wandering.shop in part as a place for SFF writers; today is #wip Wednesday there. So it might be an SFF instance, but it’s in the category of a convention - which is for writers as well as readers.

The Shop has definitely gotten rather more populated in the last couple of days, but it’s still open to new accounts.

@Mjm @gannet @chuckwendig it’s worth noting that the most polished, twitter-like experience you’ll get is on Mastodon.social.

ie, they work really hard to have no downtime and do maintenance silently in the background. The Wandering Shop is a smaller operation, and we do take occasional downtime to do maintenance, like the websites of old.

I think we have a more focused, welcoming community, but YMMV.