[omoikane]

This thread matches my experience with Mastodon and Diaspora*. It's fine if you are happy to live on individual instances and pretend that other instances do not exist, but they are not so great if you want a global audience. In this sense, they are more like the random disjoint online forums of the early 2000s, and not so much like the large monolithic social networks that people have come to expect.

[wardedVibe]

Sounds like discord without voice and with easier linking. It does seem like forum approaches are becoming more common. I've heard that groups were the only part of Facebook with a lot of activity, but I'm not on that platform.