I’d be totally cool with that. I’ll take quality discussion with less people to talk to over huge quantities of slop and rage bait any day of the week.

I think we need to let go of this idea that online platforms need to be as big as possible or be considered huge failures. This is a lie told by the owners of corporate-run and owned social media that needs to grow at the expense of basically everything else, because they somehow managed to convince investors to pour money into what is effectively a shitty glorified message board and they expect a return on that investment. There used to be thousands of niche forums all over the internet before corporate social media and link aggregators effectively staged a hostile takeover and homogenised everything, they did numbers that would look pathetic in comparison to daily users of X or Facebook, but they still had a busy feel balanced with a sense of community. It doesn’t actually take that many people to achieve that, it’s a fraction of what some people will have you believe.

I would be totally fine with that tbh. Though I wonder if we’ll ever get to the place where a Mastodon client somehow incorporates an algorithmic timeline for those who want that?