Mastodon and other federated platforms are to social media what suburbia historically has been to cities. People think it'll resolve or at least mitigate the issues of digital privacy, digital harassment, and digital overpopulation, but in reality will just create ever more wasteful and unaccountable digital sprawl while inevitably recreating the exact same problems (e.g. HOA discrimination, nosey neighbors, hiding a…
Not really. It's just a return to the olden days of internet communities, when users controlled the sites they posted on and people found groups to talk to about things that interested them (rather than being stuck on a giant platform owned by a large corporation). And it's probably better for society in general that communities work that way. You don't want millionaires and oorporations controlling discourse, and in…
I was on an emulation forum for several years in the early 2000s that had people from every walk of life, every stripe of politics, on essentially every continent of the planet, yet the number of regular users was still within Dunbar's number, for years. That's not going to happen nowadays. If you can reasonably attract ten users, you can and probably will attract several hundred, or more, in much smaller timelines.
This is borne out by looking at Mastodon instances right now--there are ~200 out of ~3000 that fall within reasonable estimates of Dunbar's number and there's no guarantee that any of them will be stable even in the short term. It's a Great Filter for comprehensible human communities.
Secondly, the notion that by federating or centralizing, you can avoid or generate discursal control is pretty unfounded. The 2016 US Presidential election and Brexit are more than enough evidence of that. People can and will use any capacity within their reach to influence discourse, regardless of who owns or doesn't own the infrastructure.
I'd argue that federating generally allows for more pernicious discursal control by monied and corporate interests, solely through the lack of singular points of control. If you can automate contact and distribution, which is already trivial, you can spread whatever you want as far as you please as much as you like, knowing that if 90% of administrators remove it, you still have 90% possible impressions and 10% of instances that haven't removed it. If the content is even remotely infectious, it'll immediately spread back to the 90% by the 10% of users, anyway. Chain-letters are great examples of this in action (and in their more modern forms "upvote this if," "retweet this if," and "like this if").