also, a lot of these projects have been on a slow simmer for a long time, and are only just now starting to become complete and interesting.
edit: though it does seem to be true that takahe's initial commit was nov 5 :) and personally i don't consider it complete and interesting yet
Go ahead and look over any Mastodon thread a year ago or before.
Generally it was dismissed with "oh it's too niche" or "moderation will be too difficult".
People ignored the communities already on it and the tech overall.
Only until people got pissy about Elon running Twitter instead of hedge funds did the general sentiment here change.
It wasn't about the tech, and not even about Elon specifically, it was the Twitter safe space got taken away.
But now hopefully the people who want that safe space will isolate themselves in mastodon instances that block all others and we can all live in peace from them.
Or rather, which ones already are.
When you block other instances you realize you are islanding yourself off, right? Not the other way around.
Everyone is federated until you block, so you are isolating yourself from the norm when you block others.
It's not too noticeable as the english speaking instances are small currently, but those who don't want wolfballs and friends, or this or that are more isolated than those who do.
It makes sense that those who want to hide views from others are the outliers. Those who want to be open and allowing of diverse thought are more interoperable.
My argument is that if a server behaves in a way that the majority of large servers block it, then it is islanded, not the others.