[Pxtl]

Yeah, this is pretty much what I'm hoping for on Mastodon. On Twitter I would occasionally turn on the "home screen" instead of the "latest" feed to see what's going on in a larger world. Including such a facility (or even multiple alternate implementations of such a facility) would be nice in mastodon.

The other part of the post - the abuse? That part is harder. Fundamentally, commercial social networks spend a crapload of money and traumatize working-class moderators all over the world trying to keep spammers, scammers, illegal pornography, hatespeech, and worse off their platforms. I don't know how sustainable it is for hobbyists to implement that.

Realistically, I'm expecting that if Mastodon truly takes off, it will gradually bifurcate: 1) Free instances that are hives of scum and villainy 2) Paid instances that are well-moderated and pleasant

Fortunately, Mastodon servers have the ability to federate with other servers in a "second class citizen" sort of way, so members of group 2 will be able to follow people on group 1, but the mayhem of free instances will be purely opt-in on a per-user basis.

I mean Mastodon has a lot of problems. Its tech stack is a nightmare to admin, and it is notoriously wastefully chatty when it comes to server-to-server messaging. But those faults can be fixed.

The social problem is much harder.