Not being indexed by search engines is a fatal flaw in my opinion. There might be some interesting discussions taking place on Mastodon, but I would have no way of knowing.
As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.
So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.
If you had a way to search like "hey there's an interesting conversation going on at my local community center, maybe I will go and join their next session."
At the same time, does your local community center want the unfiltered public to have input to their conversations? Or are they only interested in spreading it to friends/neighbors of people already at the center?
I like the idea of it, but I also have no idea how one would find any of these cited discussions. It seems having an existing social network gives you a strong advantage. As a lurker, introvert, and ruralite, I think I'm going to be naturally disadvantaged on these types of platforms.
Or maybe I'm just misunderstanding the whole design.
As an analogy, there might be some interesting discussions happening at my local Community Center, or my neighbor's house, but I would have no way of knowing. But to discover these discussions, I would need to meet someone with a shared interest who would, in turn, share with me a place that they go to for continued discussions and to hang out with interesting people who share an interest.
So maybe, if done correctly, this is a feature? The good content is one extra network connection away, but easy enough to find if an advocate chooses to highlight content, share a connection, or otherwise create an inbound reference to the community.