TBH i don't get the point of mastodon. Social media is primarily "media", broadcasting, so they must be megaphones, which by necessity includes large scale commercial and entertainment activity. Mastodon's purpose of small cozy chats is better served by ... chat which is more self-selective and fit for the niches or countercultures
> large scale commercial and entertainment activity
I think you're redefining "social media" (which I think was previously called "social networking" once upon a time) as "broadcasting" and "megaphones" so naturally your definition doesn't fit.
But socializing online is about sharing information, interests, and building a (small, or the size you prefer) network of people you consider online friends.
Discord does seem to work well for chatting about those same things with the people I know, and I can easily see how others use it for the same usage but with online-only friends. But whenever I visit my corner of the fediverse, I see lots of like-minded people sharing content that's relevant to me (the hashtags I follow), and I've engaged and enjoyed the experience.
There was and is no reason why any of that requires "large scale commercial and entertainment activity", and, in fact, those things seem antithetical to building up a community of people you want to communicate with online about your interests.
Whatever starts as 'social networking' i think it is inevitable that it will end up becoming 'social media', because people add friends but don't delete, and by the central limit theorem users will become average, that can easily be substituted by an ML model. Even if mastodon is OK now, it will end up with the same situation as it grows.
I still prefer when the world was divided in forums, not friend groups.
A full on chat program is more of an active pastime, whereas mastodon I choose to browse now and then throughout the day, and don't expect replies or reactions to be necessarily the same day, just 'whenever'. Perhaps that's why it skews so Gen-X older.
I think this is why Discord is doing great. You can easily find communities about specific topics where you can chat in real-time with people... and whatever you write in there feels somewhat ephemeral, instead of being permanently stored on the public internet.
True. Chat feels alive. Quite different from posting on social media where next you have to wait whether anybody even saw it at all (usually not) and can be bothered to like it (which does nothing) or respond to it.
