Good. Currently the fediverse is a breath of fresh air compared to modern social media with all of its name calling, vapid trends and political polarization. Hopefully whatever that makes regular social media "what it is today" _will_ never be seen over there.

The internet at first only had traction by HN types, and we had the same hope for it.

As they say, ‘the future is now, albeit sparsely distributed’

That's not the case at all (thank god). Most of the posts I see on the federated timeline are LGBT-related and silly Twitter-like jokes.

I tried a GNUSocial site and got nothing but spammers and hackers uploading photos to my site. I ran out of disk space, and had to shut it down. Moderation of such a site with just one person is a nightmare.

Technical users seem to be the minority there, unless you choose an instance looking for them.

I've only checked out mastodon (which is supposedly part of fediverse) but it looks like a slower version of Twitter with a tiny fraction of Twitter's userbase - most of it already doubleposting on Twitter anyway. And most sites with it i've seen look like they want to sell me some service and feel faceless and soulless. I've considered at some point setting up my own instance for my own use since from what i can understand you can configure to 'fetch' messages from other instances, but (at least at the time) the system requirements for what is essentially passing around tiny snippets of text are so high that it is ridiculous. Then i thought perhaps a desktop client would provide the same functionality but the joinmastodon site has a bunch of them without any information about what they are, who makes them, if they're safe or whatever and the sites of a couple that i checked are again that "faceless, souless, perhaps trying to sell you something or sell your data to someone" variety.

So i lost interest.