Thank you for that context. Perhaps then one day Mastodon can try to hope to pull people away from Bluesky after people have given up on Mastodon and on X and spent all that time and energy moving to Bluesky, and then don't want to have to move still yet again. I didn't really use Digg but that seems to me to be an apt analogy where people gave up on it and seeing nothing better switched to Reddit, and then finally we here moved to Kbin, now Mbin, and/or Lemmy, and now PieFed as an option as well. Except so many remained on Reddit.

Once people move to Bluesky, they will stay there and resist moving elsewhere. Many would RATHER move to Mastodon, if only it would make its experience actually usable,. Especially by journalists who then write negative things about their experiences trying to use it and how frustrating it all was for them.

You are, intentionally or otherwise, distorting what I said. Who cares about "me" - yes I stopped recommending Fediverse tools bc it's useless to do so especially when the developers themselves don't even seem to care about making it a good platform to use for others besides themselves, meh it's their code and their right to do whatever they wish - but anyway I'm just one person.

What I said though was that journalists are writing articles saying how much Mastodon sucks. That could have been listened and responded to, but instead the concept was attempted to be buried, and the position of the person offering such rejected - exactly as you are doing here to me now btw, as if consent of the governed should not matter somehow, and they all just need to suck it up, get with the program, and use the same platform regardless of what it personally costs them? That btw is also the identical position of X as well.

I even included a link to one example of such an article. There are MANY others.

I hope you choose to be curious, rather than think that you already have the answer. There is so much more that I think that you are missing here. We seem to not have the same goal at all if I would like to entice people to use the platform but you would rather tell people that they "must" - that approach will not work out well in the end, imho, and you do not get to decide what is "better" in the minds of other people. If others likewise display it, that kind of hubris will continue to leave Mastodon in the forgotten bin of history. You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

I took a quick look and it seems that SDF is not defederated from virtually ANYTHING at all (just one instance that as it was dying got taken over by spam) - not even the known CSAM (Child Sexual Abuse Material) ones, nor the most controversial triad across the entire Threadiverse: lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, and the one that the main Lemmy software developers also run, lemmy.ml.

One time I said something in hexbear.net along the lines that Biden, who was then President, at least lowered gas prices, so at least there was that - and my inbox just BLEW UP with replies streaming in for WEEKS and WEEKS afterwards. Then I did something similar at lemmygrad.ml with the same result. They are purely engagement trolls, enjoying their argumentation style of... well, as you said it. They are basically 4chan.

And it is not like I am on a campaign to wipe out their very existence, but neither do I want to recommend the Threadiverse/Fediverse to people if that is the kind of experience that those people will receive - and then look weirdly at me for having recommended it to them in the first place. There are stories aplenty on r/RedditAlternatives saying exactly as you: they came, they got disgusted with what they saw, and they immediately noped out, heading right back to Reddit. People here can be kind - whereas on Reddit that is extremely rare, especially in the larger subs. Traffic here is low and you can feel like you will be heard - on Reddit you are buried beneath an avalanche of thousands of comments, some of which are proven bots (repeating identical patterns of messages spaced years apart, just from different account names but they are word-for-word and it is beyond any rational thought of credulity to think that they could be otherwise - e.g. if you repeated this, my entire message here back to me, not even just this sentence or paragraph but the entire thing, then I would surmise that you had copied and pasted it, not responded organically, and would not believe you if you claimed otherwise, especially upon finding out that you literally could get paid irl money $$$ for having done so, to increase "engagement stats" and therefore advertising revenue).

I doubt you will remain long on SDF - the Lemmy software has very few features to help you deal with such trolling, although you can help reduce the clutter a little bit by blocking the instance. Unfortunately this does not "block" the "instance", instead only muting the communities on it - leaving the users there free to reply to you in other communities, triggering notifications, blowing up your inbox, and otherwise wasting your time. You will convert nobody there as they exist in their own artificial echo chamber realities, and instead you will become more like them.

I recommend checking out PieFed - the list of features that it has that Lemmy lacks is long and it is FANTASTIC! e.g. polls, flairs (both user and post), Topics/Feeds that are both user-customizeable and shareable, etc. etc. etc. etc. etc., but most importantly the ability to block all users from an instance, which that one feature alone silences I am not even kidding basically 99% of all trolling negative experiences on the entire platform. See more at https://join.piefed.social/ e.g. a list of instances at https://join.piefed.social/try/. Or if you want to stay with Lemmy (but... why though?) and are in the USA then discuss.online or if in Europe then feddit.org - neither of which defederate from lemmy.ml nor allow you to personally do so unlike PieFed, but both of which at least defederate from both hexbear.net and lemmygrad.ml.

Unless you are also a troll:-P, but the above is still sound advice imho.