the sub-500 active user, community focused, often (but not always) topically themed instances of the fediverse are absolutely the sweet spot in my opinion for using this as a place for getting to know people over the long term. huge noisy instances just have no local community generally because they're too dang big and they have no mechanism for sub-communities (local neighborhoods?) to grow and thrive, in no small part because we flatten interactions into weird all-or-nothing relationships in this following-follower modality so building community through instance choice and heavy use of the local timeline is the only real play.

@djsundog secretly, what everyone wants is LJ or G+ Groups. Give me good ol’ 2000-era LJ groupings, arbitrary user-chosen protected groups, and I’d be a happy camper. AP can do it. Just no one really wants to write anything that’d fuck up or confuse mastodon.

@sungo totally agree.

@djsundog @sungo i think instead of "groups" i'd prefer honest-to-god forums