In 1844, Karl Marx nailed the essence of what it's like to make software in 2018, whether or not you're getting paid:
"the external character of labor for the worker appears in the fact that it is not his own, but someone else’s, that it does not belong to him, that in it he belongs, not to himself, but to another"
The upcoming version of Mastodon (2.6) will have improved support for so-called circles (a group of recipients that is less than all your followers)
Mastodon itself does not implement circles, mind you, but e.g. Hubzilla does, and any ActivityPub server could.
Prior to this patch, such messages would appear as DMs with a large number of recipients in Mastodon. After the patch, they will appear just like normal private posts.
when I first ran D&D, my grandmother, who had bought fully into the IT'S SATANISM hype, insisted on sitting and watching the first session
about an hour in, she threw her hands up and yelled 'THIS IS JUST MATH' and stormed off
Eugen Rochko
Senator Meow