Some Thoughts on Mastodon
seths.blog
seths.blog
It is an interesting point. Also ratios of individual Mastodons to federated ones will be instructive.
I haven't used it yet - more of a subreddit type experience than a Twitter type experience?
IMHO no. Very much like Twitter, only with the discovery features nudged towards the "local community and its reach" (and thus very different between a 20 people instance and a 20k people instance)
It's kind of a mix, but I'd call it more Twitter.
When you're not logged in, and you browse a specific instance, there are two feeds, the "Local" feed which shows just posts to that instance made from any account on that instance (akin to the "subreddit" experience), the "Federated" feed which also shows posts from accounts on other instances that the instance you're browsing on knows about, and an "Explore" feed which shows popular posts from the entire federated network.
If you've created an account and followed people from multiple instances, you also get a "Home" feed which just shows accounts that you're following, regardless of what instance they're on.
In that way, you can decide if you want to have a more "subreddit" experience by only browsing the Local feed, or the more "Twitter" experience by browsing either the Explore, Federated, or Home feeds.
Of course, most people will only have an account on one instance, but people can follow you no matter what instance they use. If you use, for example, "hackernews.social", you can interact with posts from any other instance, but your username will show up as "@username@hackernews.social".