Is this what Twitter was like on day 1? I don't know what to do, who to follow, where/how to find them. My guess is as usage increases the platform will continue to develop, but it's sort of chaotic right now.

@shapiro i felt the same way about 6 hours ago and now i'm totally hooked. click around on your local timeline and follow anyone who sounds interesting or has toots you like. soon, your local and federated timelines will be well-populated with kind souls who do good toots

@linguangst That's sort of what I'm doing now. It needs to develop more to grow beyond the early adopter market. Right now, Mastodon appears to garnering a large community amongst engineers, programmers, infosec professionals, and academics, which is awesome, but not the adopters that will guarantee platform longevity. Let's see what happens 🤷‍♀️

@shapiro it's been running just fine for a while now, it would seem (and since it's built on top of GNU social, i don't think dev is much of an issue in the long-term).

my impression is its core userbase is queer/trans folx and infosec (as you mention), but i think for the former group in particular, network saturation is less important than tight-knit communities of like-minded people—and with granular privacy controls to boot. i don't see longevity as the pertinent issue.