I was on Mastodon for three years. I deleted my account. When I found out that Charlie Kirk was murdered, my second thought was "well, best create yet another filter on Mastodon so I don't have to watch people celebrate Charlie Kirk being murdered" and when I caught myself having that thought I realised that being on Mastodon was a net negative for my wellbeing.
(I didn't like the guy either, by the way, or at least I knew enough about him that I knew I have much better things to do than listen to him. There are more than a few people like that, all of whom I wish find some peace in their hearts, and none of whom I wish to come to any harm.)
Mastodon is packed to the brim with literal psychopaths and people pretending to be psychopaths for imaginary Internet points. It is not an experience I suggest for anyone who is neither of those things.
From early in my Mastodon journey I made it something of rule to not follow anyone who doesn't CW politics, and mute or block many of the accounts that post politics on main unfiltered.
I don't need that many filters if people make good use of Subject lines (I do like to joke that CW is the short Welsh for Cwbject.) It means I don't see a lot of "celebrities" in my feed that cross-post from one of the other sites and doesn't add CWs because their client or cross-poster doesn't support them, but that seems to be so much the better. It also often means I remove Boost privileges in my feeds from people that will boost stuff without CWs.
That sort of curation is a lot of little bits of work over years. I can definitely understand the feeling that the easiest way to catch up on that curation is to just quit. It's why I quit Twitter (when it was still Twitter). It's why I don't bother with BlueSky or Threads. Mastodon gives me enough curation tools and I've used them for long enough that I feel happy with Mastodon.
If this is intended to accuse me of being a Charlie Kirk fan I can only conclude that you either did not read what I wrote (in which case, you should refrain from replying to it), or you are being dishonest on purpose.
Well, I won't debate whether "cool" is the right word. But ideologically I think federation is better than centralization when it can be made to work in practical terms, and Mastodon works.
Really. Where? Unhelpful answers of the form "Just install extension X for browser Y and use it to run script Z" are all anyone has ever been able to suggest when I've asked this question elsewhere.
If you click on Preferences, it's under Appearance which is the first section you see. You can change the site theme to a light option. At least on Mastodon.social.
There's no Preferences button. If there is, they've either hidden it well, or it's not visible without a login.
There should simply be a button -- a conspicuous one -- that toggles the color scheme. It's trivial to add such a button. It doesn't need to be tied to a user ID; it doesn't even need to set a cookie. The fact that no such button exists is a choice someone made, a poor choice that disregards decades of human-machine interface research.
Failure to go full Karen about goofy things like this has made the Web a little worse for almost everyone in one way or another. So... there ya go.