[Kye]

Seriously. Mastodon started at thousands. People wrote articles insisting it would never go anywhere. It's still growing with thousands of instances for every sort of community three years after the dismissive op-eds started, and it didn't have the benefit of a major profile promoting it.

[dimensi0nal]

The largest Mastodon instance is full of content that isn't exactly allowed on traditional social media (i.e. lolicon). I don't think WT:Social will have the same competitive advantage.

[hnuser77]

Technically speaking, the largest Mastodon instance is full of content that isn't exactly allowed on traditional social media (i.e. far-right extremism). See https://fediverse.network/

[Semiapies]

Which is going to be an anti-selling point for a lot of people.

[viraptor]

It depends how well the blocking features will be advertised. "Lots of extremists have converged at xxx.social. You can block them all in one go." sounds better to me than what's happening in Twitter.

[lasagnaphil]

Agreed, federated instance is a way better solution than Twitter blocklists. In fact, I think Mastodon was designed to combat such extremists from day one, so even with the alt-right’s foray into the fediverse things will go at least better than Twitter.