@FediTips Apparently we don't share our view of the Mastodon gGmbH, which you don't seem to trust at all.

We also seem to fundamentally disagree on moderation. I don't *want* my instance to defederate / block mastodon.social. Mastodon gives me tools to do so myself if I want and I'm on Mastodon because I want to be in control.

You know what would be more productive than argueing against big instances? Advocating for donations. I'd even say donate to the gGmbH so they're less likely to sell.

@FediTips Even if they had more members, I don't see how groups are supposed to work. I still would need to find the group, which I would most likely do via boosts, at which point I would also find accounts within the group (if I was a random user and not a weirdo discussing meta stuff).

I also don't see how the Mastodon network would not be in massive danger if Mastodon gGmbH went to shit. We'd still need a fork and all instances to switch, which is highly unlikely to happen. ...1/2

@FediTips Groups are a worse way of the same problem topic-centered instances already have: They don't work as long as not enough people use them. I picked seven random groups that would interest me and six had under 100 followers, four had under 50. That's much worse than hashtags.

Regarding the dangers of buyouts etc, that's way too speculative for me. Mastodon is ridiculously small compared to all other social networks. But I mostly wanted to point out that your post ignores disadvantages.

@FediTips I am currently setting up a new account on mastodon.social and that's for all the things that post ignores, which is all the things that work worse on federated networks. For example, following hashtags does not show all posts with that hashtag on all instances, just those that your instance knows of, which counteracts the benefit of instances for certain topics. The smaller your topic, the more you are limited to the people on your instance and might be better off with a big instance.